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An accelerator node with a breakout riser card drawn part-way out on its rails, its ribbon cable landing on a compact activation-capture instrument beside it

How Mechanistic Interpretability Research Is Actually Done

Before any claim about what a model is doing, someone ran a forward pass, trained a probe, decomposed an activation into sparse pieces, and changed something on purpose to see what moved. This is that process, in the order it actually happens.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 19 min read

A long brushed-steel rail track down an archive wall, brass carriages holding specimen sleeves densely packed on the left and thinning toward bare rail on the right, one new carriage caught sliding into place with its latch pin still lifted

AI Research

A History of Mechanistic Interpretability

Long before the term existed, researchers tried to read meaning into a trained network's units. This is mechanistic interpretability's dated history: a naming paper, a landmark result, and three labs converging on one tool within months of each other.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 16 min read

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