It’s not like interpretability research is immune. You could’ve been in year 4 of your degree when Anthropic released their sparse autoencoder research. It’s just less busy because as you correctly note, industry mostly cares about getting the black box to print money.

> Plus it would be fascinating

You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.