#AI research methodology

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A long laboratory bench holding four distinct interpretability rigs side by side — a probing breakout header, a feature-encoder card cage, twin accelerator sleds linked by a lifted carrier board, and a steering interposer card — each caught active and unfinished at the same moment

Probing, Sparse Autoencoders, Patching, and Steering: The Main Interpretability Methods, Compared

Four ways of looking inside a trained network answer four different questions — what is decodable, what is the code's basis, what is causally necessary, and what can be moved by hand. None of the four subsumes the others.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 18 min read

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