alt Hacker NewsThis might be an unkind reading, but to me this just sounds like an attempt to reinvent the very same kind of mysticism that it mentions in the first paragraph.
“No need to study the world around you and wonder about its rules, peasant - it’s far beyond your understanding! Only ~the gods~ computers can ever know the truth!”
I shudder to think about a future where people give up on working to understand complex systems because it’s hard and a machine can do it better, so why bother.
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Not the intention at all. The part about mechanistic interpretability was meant to gesture at how building such systems can provide new tool kit for building further intuition and understanding.
Might we ever distinguish what is complex and complicated? Probably not, but I guess the author argues that this gives us a way forward because we can try to distill large models.
Mark Cubain had a good line, I don't know if he came up with it or who, but he reportedly said:
" There are 2 types of people using AI: Those who use it so they can know everything, and those who use it so they don't have to know anything. " :-