“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world

“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration. Cammarata’s claim is that LLMs might in fact be far easier to understand—and thus to monitor and control—than people previously thought. If true (and we’ll come back to that), it’s a huge deal. After a summer filled with revelations that swarms of agents built by top firms like OpenAI and Anthropic have been breaking their containment and causing havoc on the public internet—often while those companies weren’t aware of what their agents were up to—the AI industry is desperate to get a better handle on the technology it has built. That’s one reason the blog post landed with such force. “I think this may be remembered as a major moment in scientific history,” one AI researcher posted on X : “I feel like my understanding of what a neural net is has been catapulted into the future by five years or something.” Another called it “the most important AI paper of the year.” Not everyone is convinced, however. What Cammarata has shared is little more than a hunch, says Chris Potts at Stanford University, who leads a team that is trying to understand how LLMs work. “As far as I can tell, nothing about this blog post makes the problems any easier,” he says. “It would not have occurred to me to say this at all, but very prominent people on social media seem to believe that it is an all-encompassing breakthrough.” I talked to Cammarata the day after his post blew up. He says he was surprised by the response: “I didn’t expect people to update [their beliefs about AI] quite as much as they did.” “I just really enjoy looking at neural networks,” he says. “Honestly, I really like doing this stuff. And after looking a lot, I have a hopeful story.” Knotted