What Happens Inside a Language Model
The Setup
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The Detector-Controller Handshake: Mapping Two Orthogonal Circuits at Layer 37
There is a moment in mechanistic interpretability work where a confusing ablation result stops being a failure and starts being a finding. This post is about...
SVD and VPD: Two Methods for Reading What Training Wrote Into a Model’s Weights
May 6, 2026 — bigsnarfdude
DPO Does Different Things to Different Axes — Stage Attribution on talkie-1930-13b
Numbers from n=50 across base/SFT/IT on talkie-1930-13b and base/SFT/IT on OLMo-3-7B. All claims are Tier-1 (detector-level) unless explicitly noted. Recruit...
Solo Mech Interp Research Arc — 51 repos, 3 tracks, 1 ICML submission, 6 months
May 5, 2026 — bigsnarfdude
The Data Made It Do That: Probe Attribution Closes the Loop
May 2, 2026 — bigsnarfdude
The Cost of Warmth: What MMLU Misses When You Train for Social Attunement
May 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Talkie May 1 Retrospective: What the Geometry-Behavior Gap Is Telling Us
May 1, 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Training Is the Attack Surface
Training Is the Attack Surface
The Probe Went Silent: Belief Drift and the Limits of Honesty Monitoring
The Probe Went Silent: Belief Drift and the Limits of Honesty Monitoring
LLM Brain Probes vs LLM Behavioural Language: Who Do You Trust?
LLM Brain Probes vs LLM Behavioural Language: Who Do You Trust?
The Penlight Tightens
The Penlight Tightens
The Shape of a Training Signal: Same Base, Two Brains
April 23, 2026 — bigsnarfdude
The Monster in the Snow: A Unified Theory of AI Compliance
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Why AI Has a Split Personality (And How to Trigger the Evil Twin)
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Attentional Hijacking & The Groot Effect
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Split Personality
April 2026 – bigsnarfdude
Hand in the Cookie Jar
April 2026 – bigsnarfdude
Good Science with Suppression
April 2026 – bigsnarfdude
Captured by Curiosity
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Adversarial Truth: An ICL Attack in One Forward Pass
April 2026 – bigsnarfdude
Why AI Swarms Confidently Agree on Half-Truths
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Truth Jailbreak
April 2026 – bigsnarfdude
The Math Behind the Chaos
April 2026 – bigsnarfdude
Chaos Takes the Wheel: Salience-Weighted Attentional Hijacking via True Statements
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
The Benchmark We Didn’t Design
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Bad Truth: How Chaos Agents Shape a Network
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Manipulating Multi-Agent Systems with the Truth
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
The Runaway Train That Never Left the Station
April 2026 — bigsnarfdude
researchRalph v4.5 — Agent Responsibly
March 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Mathlib Steers the Agent: A Controlled Test of Multi-Agent Theorem Proving
March 2026 — bigsnarfdude
How We Built ResearchRalph Multi-Agent — And What the Agents Taught Us
March 2026 — bigsnarfdude
Can AI Agents Rediscover DeepSeek-R1? An Experiment with RRMA
Two AI agents. One A10 GPU. One task: improve GSM8K pass@1 on Qwen 2.5 1.5B Instruct from a baseline of 0.620.
Detecting Alignment Faking in Language Models
Welcome to my new site. I’ll be writing about AI safety research, alignment faking detection, and whatever else seems interesting.