MRI for the Model Mind

Imagine entrusting critical decisions to someone — or something — whose decision-making process you can't understand. For some of you, that might sound like working for your last boss (!), but in the context of AI, it's a serious limitation.

The lack of explainability is a real barrier to the broader adoption of AI in critical areas like financial services, healthcare, and employment law. Regulations increasingly demand that decisions be explainable, not just accurate. In a recent post, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, describes progress toward interpreting the "thinking" within AI models — a quest he likens to developing an MRI for AI:

One analogy I particularly liked from Amodei’s team is that AI models are more "grown" than "developed" — a concept that's still difficult for many outside the field to fully understand. Amodei also describes a "race between interpretability and model intelligence," urging others to join the interpretability side — if not for philosophical reasons, then for the commercial advantages it will increasingly bring.

And circling back to the difficult bosses (or management committees, or even your spouse...), perhaps the more we learn about AI interpretability, the more we'll understand the ultimate black box: the human mind.