Goodfire finds most neurons are legible up to trillion-parameter models, backing Cammarata's essay

CSProfKGD · x · 2026-11-11

Goodfire AI released the first technical companion to Nick Cammarata's essay 'Neural Networks are Already Clean'. Cammarata, who did early mechanistic interpretability work at OpenAI, once found only 2% of neurons legible with primitive tools; with modern agentic tooling, the vast majority of neurons in models up to trillions of parameters turn out legible, with clear circuits. Goodfire's automated interpretability pipeline studied thousands of neurons and argues neurons should be understood by their computational function rather than polysemanticity — good news for interpretability and safety.

Related event: Goodfire Study Finds LLM Neurons More Interpretable Than Expected(4 posts)→

Original post →

More from Safety

Safety channel →