“Building a model that is more transparent sheds light on how LLMs work in general, helping researchers figure out why models hallucinate, why they go off the rails, and just how far we should trust them with critical tasks.”
– Will Douglas Heaven
In a time when AI models are steadily becoming bigger and more complex, researchers at OpenAI are intentionally trying to make a model that’s smaller and simpler. Their aim is something called, “mechanistic interpretability,” or reverse-engineering AI models to help understand how they work.
Even the most advanced AI engineers don’t know how some aspects of a language model’s neurons, layers, and circuits combine to produce the results they do.
The researchers hope that gaining more insights into the mechanisms of generating text will help make the models more trustworthy, as well as open new pathways in AI research.
OpenAI’s new LLM exposes the secrets of how AI really works | MIT Technology Review | November 13, 2025 | by Will Douglas Heaven