Equation 21 · What Interpretability Actually Costs to Do at Scale
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
This mathematical expression combines the displayed quantities; its precise role follows from the surrounding article text. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
Read it piece by piece
Symbol m
m is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
How to interpret it
Read this expression with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
A simple model makes the scaling problem legible. Let a verified circuit claim require passing m distinct checks — faithfulness under intervention, completeness against the behavior it is meant to fully explain, minimality against components that turn out not to matter — and let each check take researcher-hours, including the false starts a competent skeptic would force. Total verification cost per claim is
Sources cited in the article section
- [4] Auditing language models for hidden objectives ↗
- [7] In-context Learning and Induction Heads ↗
- [8] Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 small ↗
- [9] Towards Automated Circuit Discovery for Mechanistic Interpretability ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
Return to What Interpretability Actually Costs to Do at Scale