Show HN: Steerling-8B, a language model that can explain any token it generates

This is very interesting. I don't see much discussion of interpretability in day to the day discourse of AI builders. I wonder if everyone assumes it to either be solved, or to be too out of reach to bother stopping and thinking about.

Now this is something which is very interesting to see and might be the answer to the explainability issue with LLMs, which can unlock a lot more use-cases that are off limits.

We'll see.

It makes the black box slightly more transparent. Knowing more in this regard allows us to be more precise—you go from prompt tweak witchcraft and divination to more of possible science and precise method.

SHAP would be absurdly expensive to do for even tiny models (naive SHAP scales exponentially in the number of parameters; you can sample your coalitions to do better but those samples are going to be ridiculously sparse when you're talking about billions of parameters) and provides very little explanatory power for deep neural nets.

SHAP basically does point by point ablation across all possible subsets, which really doesn't make sense for LLMs. This is simultaneously too specific and too general.

It's too specific because interesting LLM behavior often requires talking about what ensembles of neurons do (e.g. "circuits" if you're of the mechanistic interpretability bent), and SHAP's parameter-by-parameter approach is completely incapable of explaining this. This is exacerbated by the other that not all neurons are "semantically equal" in a deep network. Neurons in the deeper layers often do qualitatively different things than earlier layers and the ways they compose can completely confuse SHAP.

It's too general because parameters often play many roles at once (one specific hypothesis here is the superposition hypothesis) and so you need some way of splitting up a single parameter into interpretable parts that SHAP doesn't do.

I don't know the specifics of what this particular model's approach is.

But SHAP unfortunately does not work for LLMs at all.

It's a neat party trick, but explainability it's not solution to any AI safety issue I care about. It's a distraction from real problems, which is everything else around the model. The inflexible bureaucratic systems that make it hard to exercise rights and deflect accountability.