Reach In and Change a Thought

Foundations · 13 / 14·Joshua Uwaifo · UEFO · September 2026

NNsight: reach into a running model

Switch off one head or one MLP and watch the next word change — every result computed on the real model, and the same experiment written in nnsight’s three lines.

the running model — click a part to switch it off

prompt: → next token?

next-token probabilities

every result was computed on the real model; the page only switches between them
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The same experiment written with nnsight


    

nnsight (nnsight.net, by the NDIF team) wraps any PyTorch module so you can read or overwrite any internal value inside a with model.trace(…) block, without writing hooks. The code above is not a mock-up: biblegpt/nnsight_check.py runs these interventions through nnsight on this model and compares them with the hook-based ones the page displays — .

What NNsight is for

Interpretability is experiments, not inspection: you change something inside a running model and watch what the output does. nnsight makes that a few lines — save a hidden state, zero an attention head, patch in an activation from another prompt — and the same code runs on a laptop model or, remotely, on one too large to host.

What this shows

Switching off single heads barely moves this model’s next-token guess; switching off a whole MLP block moves it a lot, and the last block most of all. That is a causal statement about where this model keeps its knowledge, measured by KL divergence from the untouched distribution — the only kind of statement that survives scrutiny.

Nine seconds elsewhere

The foundations in learning order, then the series they lead to. Each lands in about nine seconds.