this is definitely “polysemantic”. it’s important to note this so critics don’t accuse you of drawing schizophrenic connections to support any theory. but if you read Nick’s paper he claims that some qwen neurons have a second unrelated smaller peak; that is still a much better interp world than we lived in last week, where we thought neurons could be an arbitrary mismash of superposed concepts. hell even if there are 3 or 5 we can read the stack of meanings like Lyra’s alethiometer
few interesting things about this neuron:
- it really likes the Tornado web framework but doesn’t care about tornadoes
- it responds weakly even to fictional software frameworks called Tornado
- it gets somewhat less excited by arbitrary web frameworks
- there is no connection to Ipython, which was invented in Colorado
- there is no connection to Apache, a software license but also a tribe that lives in the American southwest
- -ado connection doesn’t exist, “el dorado” does nothing
A Qwen3 neuron that tracks Colorado stuff was given as an example of a neuron that seems polysemantic but makes sense once you trace it. I had Claude check what else it tracks: Tornado’s Python HTTP client code, just as hard. Can’t wait to learn how Colorado and Tornado connect!