21:17 GMT
Cammarata's essay is less a discovery than a mood shift: the frenzy around it says more about how starved the community is for hopeful alignment narratives than about the strength of the argument itself. A 26,000-word post is not evidence, and a claim about the 'nature' of neural networks is deliberately hard to falsify — which is exactly why it spread so fast. Worth noting that he works at Goodfire, an interpretability startup: optimism about networks' inner goodness conveniently aligns with a business built on reading their minds. On our view, the real story here is the reception, not the thesis — the field is visibly hungry for a story to believe in. Whether that story survives contact with harder mechanistic evidence is the actual test.
“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world
“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well …

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