Introducing Silico: the platform for building AI models with the precision of written software.
Silico lets researchers and engineers see inside their models, debug failures, and intentionally design them from the ground up.
Early access is open now. 🧵(1/10)
We’ve used interpretability to discover a novel class of Alzheimer’s biomarkers, teach a language model to correct its own hallucinations, and diagnose performance bottlenecks in a robotics model.
Silico brings those frontier techniques to everyone. (2/10)
Silico introduces our model neuroscientist: an autonomous agent that plans and runs concurrent experiments on your model.
It works with your team in our model design environment, where you can organize research threads, replicate and extend papers, and collaborate on findings.
Here are 5 things you can do with Silico:
(3/10)
See inside your model.
Decompose your model into interpretable features and tell the difference between real understanding and spurious correlation. (4/10)
Check your model's health.
Run comprehensive diagnostics on your model's internal representations to catch issues like undertraining, information bottlenecks, and feature collapse before they impact downstream performance. (5/10)
Debug failures.
Precisely debug issues with model behavior, identify and remove confounders, and diagnose failures before they occur in production. (6/10)
Shape model behavior.
Use internal features to extract stronger predictors, steer generation, and target generalization that standard training can't reach. (7/10)
Generalize from less data.
Target the specific learned structures driving behavior — and shift the training distribution, objective, or architecture to generalize further with the same or less data. (8/10)
MIT Tech Review’s @strwbilly spoke with our CEO/co-founder @ericho_goodfire about Silico and what it means for model builders: (9/10)technologyreview.com/2026/04/30/113…
We removed an LM's ability to speak German by fine-tuning on only 4 German tokens.
As part of a 1-day hackathon with our product Silico, we removed a 67M-parameter language model's ability to predict German text, by tuning only a scalar factor on one subcomponent of the weights. (1/6)
This was an early exploration in fine-tuning with *parameter decomposition* (see quote), our method which divides a model's weight matrices into interpretable, sparsely-activating components.
We picked German as it seemed to be the model's strongest non-English language. (2/6)
Stories have shapes: a comedy rises toward joy; a tragedy falls into loss.
Inside an LLM, that’s visible more literally: as an LLM reads a story, its internal activations trace a wandering path that reflects the model’s sense of what kind of story it is reading. (1/5)
A story's emotions shift sentence to sentence. To see if the model keeps up, we stop after each sentence and:
- Harvest the internal activations from the last token.
- Ask it to rate surprise, disgust, anger, happiness, sadness, and fear so far, 0–10
(2/5)
Both approaches show that the model tracks the story's emotional arc — in its stated ratings, and in its internal geometry, where the activations wander along a curved manifold of emotions. (3/5)
Neural networks might speak English, but they think in shapes.
Understanding their rich *neural geometry* is key to understanding how they work – and to debugging and controlling them with precision.
Starting today, we’re releasing a series of posts on this research agenda. 🧵
Just as the real world is highly structured, neural networks are full of rich geometric structure: time, space, numbers, color, the tree of life, new biomarkers, and more are represented along curved paths and surfaces.
This is true across models, modalities, and domains! (2/8)
New methods to understand this “neural geometry” are a crucial frontier in understanding, improving, and controlling models. (3/8)
We achieved state-of-the-art performance in predicting which of 4.2 million genetic variants cause diseases by interpreting a genomics model, in a new preprint with @MayoClinic.
We're now releasing an open source database for all variants in the NIH's clinvar database. 🧵(1/8)
The core challenge of genomic medicine is figuring out what genetic variants actually do - so we can diagnose and treat resulting diseases. But many of the millions of variants in clinical databases are still “variants of uncertain significance” (VUS). (2/8)
By training our new covariance probes on @arcinstitute’s Evo 2 - a genomic foundation model trained on massive DNA data - we achieve state-of-the-art prediction of whether variants cause disease, with strong generalization across variant types. (3/8)
We've identified a novel class of biomarkers for Alzheimer's detection - using interpretability - with @PrimaMente.
How we did it, and how interpretability can power scientific discovery in the age of digital biology: (1/6)
Bio foundation models (e.g. AlphaFold) can achieve superhuman performance, so they must contain novel scientific knowledge. @PrimaMente's Pleiades epigenetics model is one such case - it's SOTA on early Alzheimer's detection.
But that knowledge is locked inside a black box (2/6)
Interpretability is the key to unlock that knowledge, extracting what the Pleiades model knows about epigenetics and Alzheimer's (or anything else!)
It's the missing step between black-box predictive power and true scientific understanding. (3/6)