Even the greatest human minds building generative artificial intelligence that is poised to change the world admit they do not comprehend how digital minds think.

"People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work," Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei wrote in an essay posted online in April.

"This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology."

Unlike traditional software programs that follow pre-ordained paths of logic dictated by programmers, generative AI (gen AI) models are trained to find their own way to success once prompted.

In a recent podcast Chris Olah, who was part of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI before joining Anthropic, described gen AI as "scaffolding" on which circuits grow.

Olah is considered an authority in so-called mechanistic interpretability, a method of reverse engineering AI models to figure out how they work.

This science, born about a decade ago, seeks to determine exactly how AI gets from a query to an........

© International Business Times