Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools
anthropic.com

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161 points

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jlaneve

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8 days ago

20 comments

rob-olmos ・ 7 days ago

Anthropic employees Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken did an interview recently with Dwarkesh Patel, pieces here and there was about the circuit tracing insights.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-trenton-2 -- search the transcript for "circuit" for the quick bits.

Eg, "If you look at the circuit, you can see that it's not actually doing any of the math, it's paying attention to that you think the answer's four and then it's reasoning backwards about how it can manipulate the intermediate computation to give you an answer of four."

https://transformer-circuits.pub/

Tostino ・ 7 days ago

This type of stuff is really important in my opinion. Getting this type of stuff open sourced allows academics and other researchers to try and do this type of interpretability research on a more level playing field.

I think the more people looking at this the better. I have a feeling there will be some breakthroughs in identifying important circuits and being able to make more efficient model architectures that are bootstrapped from some identified primitives.

ofou ・ 7 days ago

Is this Garcon [1], or a new tool?

[1]: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2021/garcon/index.html

Eduard ・ 7 days ago

thought this was about PCB tracing and was disappointed.

  • dvh ・ 7 days ago

    If you only want to trace veroboards (stripboards) and not full blown PCBs I made a browser tool for that: https://github.com/dvhx/stripboard2schematic

    • Workaccount2 ・ 7 days ago

      By total coincidence I have a project at the prototype stage that I will be building (hopefully starting tonight) on a strip board. Thanks!

  • Henchman21 ・ 7 days ago

    Same here! Then I immediately thought: I wish people would stop misusing words followed by I guess I think I’m in charge of words now. Then, idly: I’m starting to resemble that “Old Man Yells at Cloud” meme

    Funny things, thoughts.

  • AdamH12113 ・ 7 days ago

    Yeah, I actually have a decades-old two-layer board that I need to reproduce and I would love to be able to feed images of it into some sort of tool and have it generate a schematic (or at least a netlist) automatically.

    • duskwuff ・ 7 days ago

      It's not automatic, but one way I've seen people reverse-engineer PCBs (and ICs!) is to import scans of the subject in Kicad, then start tracing out the connections on screen.

  • buescher ・ 7 days ago

    You and me both. The reverse engineering tools are out there even if most of the search results are AI slop that recommends common layout tools. If I really needed the work done though I'd just pay one of the overseas services and clean up from there.

  • Archit3ch ・ 7 days ago

    I was excited for a moment.

  • mrheosuper ・ 7 days ago

    Same. Those AI bros keep stealing our terminology.

  • asadm ・ 7 days ago

    ugh same here.

  • forgotpwagain ・ 7 days ago

    thought this was about tracing neural circuits in the brain and was disappointed.

qtwhat ・ 7 days ago

Curious if we say "thank you", the model will be more activated and result in better answer. ^^