Hi, I’m Neel! I run the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, our job is to take a trained neural network and try to reverse engineer the algorithms and structures it has learned. If you want to learn more about the field, see my appearance on the …

Neel Nanda 10/2/20 Neel Nanda 10/2/20 Post 36: My Sense of Aesthetics An experimental post, where I try to dig into the parts of life that most spark fulfilment and joy for me, finding examples, ways of maximising for this, and trying to analyse way.

Mar 28, 2023 · Written By Neel Nanda Othello-GPT Epistemic Status : This is a write-up of an experiment in speedrunning research, and the core results represent ~20 hours/2.5 days of work (though the write-up took way longer).

Oct 24, 2022 · Co-authored by Neel Nanda and Jess Smith. Check out Concrete Steps for Getting Started in Mechanistic Interpretability for a better starting point. Why does this exist? People often get intimidated when trying to get into AI or AI Alignment research. People often think that the gulf between where they are and where they need to be is huge.

Mar 28, 2023 · Neel Nanda 2/4/23 Neel Nanda 2/4/23 Attribution Patching: Activation Patching At Industrial Scale A write-up of an incomplete project I worked on at Anthropic in early 2022, using gradient-based approximation to make activation patching far more scalable

Dec 25, 2022 · Disclaimer : This post mostly links to resources I've made. I feel somewhat bad about this, sorry! Transformer MI is a pretty young and small field and there just aren't many people making educational resources tailored to it. Some links are …

Oct 18, 2022 · Thanks to Jess Smith for his help editing this! This is an old post, see v2 here instead Introduction. This is an extremely opinionated list of my favourite mechanistic interpretability papers, annotated with my key takeaways and what I like about each paper, which bits to deeply engage with vs skim (and what to focus on when skimming) vs which bits I don’t …

Dec 21, 2022 · Written By Neel Nanda The main doc is hosted on Dynalist , which has a much better UI for long docs and I highly recommend reading it there. The below is a janky HTML dump for those who prefer this UI

Jan 31, 2023 · Written By Neel Nanda This was written as a guide for Apart Research's Mechanistic Interpretability Hackathon as a compressed version of my getting started post . The spirit is "how to speedrun your way to maybe doing something useful in mechanistic interpretability in a weekend", but hopefully this is useful even to people who aren't aiming ...

Nov 7, 2022 · Written By Neel Nanda New paper walkthrough: Interpretability in the Wild: A Circuit for Indirect Object Identification In GPT-2 Small is a really exciting new mechanistic interpretability paper from Redwood Research.