Another fantastic essay by Dario Amodei, this time about “interpretability” and the need to better understand AI:

People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology. For several years, we (both Anthropic and the field at large) have been trying to solve this problem, to create the analogue of a highly precise and accurate MRI that would fully reveal the inner workings of an AI model.