One niche that Anthropic spends more time and money on than other AI companies is called mechanistic interpretability, which means looking inside the complex math of an AI model to learn why it comes up with one particular output and not another. It’s complicated stuff; there are millions of data points that might contribute to any result, and wading through them can look more like word salad than anything useful. It’s also controversial. Describing AI models with terms borrowed from psychology and neuroscience can make their behavior seem more sophisticated than we might otherwise judge it to be.
That’s why, when Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window into its models’ “internal thoughts” as they reason through answers, there was one colleague I had to talk to. Senior editor Will Douglas Heaven, aside from having a PhD in computer science, has spent a lot of time digging into what we can say about how AI models work. I spoke with him about what we should take from Anthropic’s new (and predictably quirky) research.
What did Anthropic learn here, exactly?
Anthropic has been trying to understand how large language models (LLMs) work for a few years now. Anthropic isn’t the only one looking at this, but I think the company has made it part of its core mission more than most. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has said we won’t be able to control LLMs fully unless we learn more about how they work.
So this new research is very much in that context. It goes deeper into the weird mechanisms inside LLMs than ever before. What Anthropic learned was that LLMs have a space inside them—which Anthropic calls the J-space—filled with words that don’t appear in their output but that seem to influence the way they puzzle through problems. All this was hidden until Anthropic developed a new technique to probe its model Claude, so it’s a genuine discovery.
Sometimes these words keep track of where the LLM has got to in a particular task, sometimes they look more like flashes of recognition (for example, “protein” might pop up when you give an LLM only the letters of a protein sequence), and sometimes they represent a kind of internal commentary on the model’s decision-making. In my favorite example, Claude decided to cheat on a coding test when the word “panic” appeared.
Anthropic also found that LLMs are able to describe and manipulate the words in this space. So somehow they seem to be making use of it.
Let’s step back for a second. I don’t think of large language models as simple, but they’re also not magic. There’s a bunch of math that learns relationships between words, right? So why is it so hard to “peer” into an LLM to know what’s going on?