I had previously discussed this grant with Lovis and suggested he apply.
Why is this a good idea?
I think Sparse Autoencoders are one of the most promising areas of mech interp work right now. Better understanding SAE circuits seems exciting, and I think that understanding the circuit required to produce a feature is an important direction. This is both a sub-part of the broader project of finding end-to-end circuits, and could help with interpreting what a feature does (especially important features like the safety relevant features in Scaling Monosemanticity) - I would be very excited if this project finds case studies of features that have ambiguous maximum activating examples, but the meaning is clarified by studying a circuit.
(Note that the applicants shared me on a more detailed project proposal than what was shared publicly, which I broadly think was sensible, though I disagreed on some points)
Concerns
Research is hard, and there's a good chance this project doesn't really go anywhere interesting
This is a hard and somewhat open-ended question, though I think they had some decent ideas of concrete entry points
There's many directions the project could go in, and it'd be easy to get caught in rabbit holes/constantly flit between things and never do any of them properly.
Why this amount?
This was the salary requested, I think somewhat pegged to academic summer researcher salaries, which are a fair bit lower than the market rate for independent researchers, so no complaints from me. The compute may not be needed, since the lab provides some, but it would be silly for the project to be bottlenecked by lacking compute. This overall seems like a fairly small grant, with some chance of going somewhere interesting, and so a pretty obvious accept.
Conflicts of interest
Lovis is one of my MATS alumni, but we haven't been working together for several months, so I don't feel too concerned about the conflict of interest, and it means I have a fair amount of data to evaluate him. I don't personally benefit from this project (except in that all good mech interp research helps my own work!), and don't anticipate being a co-author on any papers produced