Inverse AI

Inverse AI

Why Inverse AI?

Modern AI systems—from credit-scoring engines to 175-billion-parameter language models—often behave as opaque black boxes. Lack of transparency fuels bias, erodes trust, and slows regulatory approval. A 2024 survey of mechanistic-interpretability techniques (Rai et al., 2024) shows that even experts struggle to trace how specific neurons drive toxic or incorrect outputs. In parallel, landmark policy such as the EU AI Act (formally adopted 2024) now requires a documented, “human-understandable” explanation for every high-risk AI decision.

Inverse AI is our community answer: an open-source hub that makes XAI practical for developers, auditors, and policymakers alike. We aggregate proven explainability and alignment tools under one permissive license—offering APIs, dashboards, and a shared research commons to make AI make sense.

How did we get here?

  • 2016
    LIME sparks modern local explanations

    Ribeiro et al. introduce LIME, the first framework for local, model-agnostic explanations, allowing practitioners to approximate any black-box model with an interpretable surrogate (KDD ’16).

  • 2017
    SHAP unifies feature-attribution theory

    Lundberg & Lee publish SHAP, grounding feature importance in Shapley values and releasing a library that soon becomes the industry default (arXiv:1705.07874).

  • 2018
    GDPR’s “right to explanation” takes effect

    Article 22 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation mandates transparency for automated decisions— a policy wake-up call that propels XAI research.

  • 2020
    Neuron-level “circuits” era

    Olah et al. release the Zoom In series, revealing how vision models form reusable logic units (Distill 2020). IBM simultaneously open-sources the AI Explainability 360 toolkit.

  • 2022
    Anthropic publishes Transformer Circuits

    Thousands of attention heads are mapped and open-sourced, proving mechanistic interpretability can scale to GPT-like models (transformer-circuits.pub).

  • 2023
    Hallucinations hit the headlines

    GPT-4 adoption surges; independent tests report ≈ 27 % factual error in zero-shot answers (Bubeck et al., 2023). Enterprises double down on explainability and safety-alignment budgets.

  • 2024
    Real-time circuit discovery & the EU AI Act

    Hsu et al. unveil CD-T (Contextual Decomposition Transformer) for live inspection of language-model circuits (arXiv 2024). Europe passes the AI Act—the first law that explicitly mandates explainability by design.

  • 2025
    Inverse AI community launch

    We stitch these breakthroughs together—APIs, dashboards, and reproducible notebooks—under one vendor-neutral umbrella. Get involved and help us push XAI from research to everyday practice.