Goodfire studies Qwen3.6-35B-A3B neurons as an interpretable basis

Goodfire Research published a study arguing that individual MLP neurons in Qwen3.6-35B-A3B are more interpretable than assumed, based on sparsification, attribution tools and research agents. Ablating the 92.2% weakest MoE neuron activations per forward pass raised language model loss by only 2.9%, and 69% of neuron poles had a single mode responsible for at least 90% of their causal effect. Natural-language neuron descriptions let a judge model predict firing with 95% accuracy against random text and recover 73% of ablation damage through simulation.