Peering Inside the Black Box: A Beginner’s Introduction to Mechanistic Interpretability (opens in new tab)

Over the last few years, large language models (LLMs) have gone from being curiosities tucked away in research labs to something most of us interact with on a daily basis; whether for drafting emails, debugging code, or simply pondering the meaning of life at 2am. And yet, for all our reliance on these systems, a rather inconvenient truth lingers in the background: nobody, not even the people who built them, can fully explain what is going on inside.