OpenAI experiment finds that sparse models could give AI builders the tools to debug neural networks
OpenAI researchers are experimenting with a new approach to designing neural networks, with the aim of making AI models easier to understand, debug, and govern. Sparse models can provide enterprises with a better understanding of how these models make decisions. Understanding how models choose to respond, a big selling point of reasoning models for enterprises, can provide a level of trust for organizations when they turn to AI models for insights. The method called for OpenAI scientists and researchers to look at and evaluate models not by analyzing post-training performance, but by adding interpretability or understanding through sparse circuits.OpenAI notes that much of the opacity of AI models stems from how most models are designed, so to gain a better understanding of model behavior, they must create workarounds. “Neural networks power today’s most capable AI systems, but they remain difficult to understand,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We don’t write these models with explicit step-by-step instructions. Instead, they learn by adjusting billions of internal connections or weights until they master a task. We design the rules of training, but not the specific behaviors that emerge, and the result is a dense web of connections that no human can easily decipher.”To enhance the interpretability of the mix, OpenAI examined an architecture that trains untangled neural networks, making them simpler to understand. The team trained language models with a similar architecture to existing models, such as GPT-2, using the same training schema. The result: improved interpretability. The path toward interpretabilityUnderstanding how models work, giving us insight into how they're making their determinations, is important because these have a real-world impact, OpenAI says. The company defines interpretability as “methods that help us understand why a model produced a given output.” There are several ways to achieve interpretability: chain-of-thought interpretability, which reasoning models often leverage, and mechanistic interpretability, which involves reverse-engineering a model’s mathematical structure.OpenAI focused on improving mechanistic interpretability, which it said “has so far been less immediately useful, but in principle, could offer a more complete explanation of the model’s behavior.”“By seeking to explain model behavior at the most granular level, mechanistic interpretability can make fewer assumptions and give us more confidence. But the path from low-level details to explanations of complex behaviors is much longer and more difficult,” according to OpenAI. Better interpretability allows for better oversight and gives early warning signs if the model’s behavior no longer aligns with policy. OpenAI noted that improving mechanistic interpretability “is a very ambitious bet,” but research on sparse networks has improved this. How to untangle a model To untangle the mess of connections a model makes, OpenAI first cut most of these connections. Since transformer models like GPT-2 have thousands of connections, the team had to “zero out” these circuits. Each will only talk to a select number, so the connections become more orderly.Next, the team ran “circuit tracing” on tasks to create groupings of interpretable circuits. The last task involved pruning the model “to obtain the smallest circuit which achieves a target loss on the target distribution,” according to OpenAI. It targeted a loss of 0.15 to isolate the exact nodes and weights responsible for behaviors. “We show that pruning our weight-sparse models yields roughly 16-fold smaller circuits on our tasks than pruning dense models of comparable pretraining loss. We are also able to construct arbitrarily accurate circuits at the cost of more edges. This shows that circuits for simple behaviors are substantially more disentangled and localizable in weight-sparse models than dense models,” the report said. Small models become easier to trainAlthough OpenAI managed to create sparse models that are easier to understand, these remain significantly smaller than most foundation models used by enterprises. Enterprises increasingly use small models, but frontier models, such as its flagship GPT-5.1, will still benefit from improved interpretability down the line. Other model developers also aim to understand how their AI models think. Anthropic, which has been researching interpretability for some time, recently revealed that it had “hacked” Claude’s brain — and Claude noticed. Meta also is working to find out how reasoning models make their decisions. As more enterprises turn to AI models to help make consequential decisions for their business, and eventually customers, research into understanding how models think would give the clarity many organizations need to trust models more.
