The Sequence Knowledge #728: Circuits, Circuits,Circuits
An overview of circuit tracing in AI interpretability.
Today we will Discuss:
An introduction to circuit tracing.
An overview of Anthropic’s circuit tracing technique for AI interpretability.
💡 AI Concept of the Day: An Introduction to Circuit Tracing
In a previous edition of this series, we introduced the notion of circuits as a key component of mechanistic interpretability. Today we are going to discuss one of the most important techniques using this building block. Circuit tracing has emerged as one of the most promising methods in mechanistic interpretability, offering a systematic way to uncover the internal “wiring diagrams” of neural networks. Rather than treating models as black boxes, circuit tracing reconstructs the causal chains of computation—linking neurons, attention heads, and layers into identifiable subgraphs that implement specific behaviors. Early examples, such as the discovery of induction heads in GPT-2, demonstrated that even large models rely on reusable algorithmic substructures. Circuit tracing extends this approach, scaling it into a rigorous framework for analyzing how modern AI systems compute.