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A global workspace in language models

anthropic.com

61–70 of 218 posts

Re: A global workspace in language models

#61

This reminded me of some weird quirk/experiment I found with LLMs that I found while messing around, maybe someone can explain it or something. Open any AI chatbot that isn't cheating by connecting to the Internet (so disable web search). Claude, DeepSeek, Kimi, whatever. Ask them this question: "What was that weird band from michigan from the 2000s that wore coloured ties" You will probably get a wrong answer, or if…

https://claude.ai/share/2b0f85a2-e7b8-4f62-91a0-eca61bdeabec Fable 5 on low gets the answer with web search turned off, one-shot!

Ah, that big model smell.

Every time someone somewhere says "an LLM can't do this", the next generation of LLMs gains one more parameter. Until that LLM can, in fact, do this.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#62

I always wondered what the model meant when it writes "I'm now considering the architecture of the service" but outputs nothing of the sorts in its CoT. Is the model really "thinking" about that stuff or is just mimicking human "manners"? And if so, where the thinking is happening if it is not in the literal chain of *thought*? I'm not sure J-Space is the answer to that question, but very interesting nevertheless.

Almost none of the hosted models give you their unredacted CoT. Claude certainly doesn't, what you get are fragments and summaries from it. There are various justifications on this, but it's mostly to make distillation and fine tuning off their model outputs a bit harder for their competitors

Its also because the CoT is probably unintelligible

Re: A global workspace in language models

#63

This reminded me of some weird quirk/experiment I found with LLMs that I found while messing around, maybe someone can explain it or something. Open any AI chatbot that isn't cheating by connecting to the Internet (so disable web search). Claude, DeepSeek, Kimi, whatever. Ask them this question: "What was that weird band from michigan from the 2000s that wore coloured ties" You will probably get a wrong answer, or if…

[deleted]

Re: A global workspace in language models

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://claude.ai/share/2b0f85a2-e7b8-4f62-91a0-eca61bdeabec Fable 5 on low gets the answer with web search turned off, one-shot!

Ah, that big model smell. Every time someone somewhere says "an LLM can't do this", the next generation of LLMs gains one more parameter. Until that LLM can, in fact, do this.

So the model was updated in the 37 minutes since OP posted his comment?

Re: A global workspace in language models

#65

This is cool but I don’t know if the comparisons to conscious awareness really make sense here. Their definition of the J-Space is basically the expectation of how much a final logits output would change as a result of a small change in a particular layer (see past work on information geometry). This seems more to me like showing there exists an abstract reasoning subspace which is generally shared across different c…

> I’d prefer a more direct claim in a paper

This is not written to be just a paper. The target audience include media and online forums, and then maybe academia.

Edit: typo

Re: A global workspace in language models

#66
What this immediately made me think is: "latent looping" style mod but for J-space specifically?

Make the J-space data of layer 22 available to the next token right at layer 1. Give J-space infinite effective depth, allow those privileged internal representations to evolve arbitrarily.

Would be an utter bitch to train. But companies are already using RLVR, which requires full autoregressive decoding and is incompatible with prefill/batching, and this isn't much worse.

Other less zany ideas involve lots of supervision over J-space directly, now that we know it exist. Which is a bit like "attach a frozen LLM to inject text based supervision into latent space" for other types of systems?

Re: A global workspace in language models

#67

This is cool but I don’t know if the comparisons to conscious awareness really make sense here. Their definition of the J-Space is basically the expectation of how much a final logits output would change as a result of a small change in a particular layer (see past work on information geometry). This seems more to me like showing there exists an abstract reasoning subspace which is generally shared across different c…

> I’d prefer a more direct claim in a paper This is not written to be just a paper. The target audience include media and online forums, and then maybe academia. Edit: typo

I’m not talking about the media release in the direct link. If you click through “Read the paper” they make the same comparisons.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#68
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost none of the hosted models give you their unredacted CoT. Claude certainly doesn't, what you get are fragments and summaries from it. There are various justifications on this, but it's mostly to make distillation and fine tuning off their model outputs a bit harder for their competitors

Its also because the CoT is probably unintelligible

More legible than seems at first glance:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wCSEpT3dTGz4N86Wi/even-illeg...

Re: A global workspace in language models

#69
Judging by the examples, if I understand it correctly, J-space supports higher-order logical / multihop transformations, but it is limited in size because of the limited network depth (max number of layers). When we emulate "reasoning," we basically extend J-space and allow the higher-order transformations to continue for longer, toward a more logical conclusion.

It sounds like instead of generating reasoning tokens end-to-end, we could probably only loop the middle layers (the ones most related to J-space) while skipping the first and last layers (less related to J-space) It probably explains why [0] worked. OP accidentally extended J-space? Also reminds of looped transformers.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431671

Re: A global workspace in language models

#70

This reminded me of some weird quirk/experiment I found with LLMs that I found while messing around, maybe someone can explain it or something. Open any AI chatbot that isn't cheating by connecting to the Internet (so disable web search). Claude, DeepSeek, Kimi, whatever. Ask them this question: "What was that weird band from michigan from the 2000s that wore coloured ties" You will probably get a wrong answer, or if…

I tried o3, 5.3 instant and 5.5 high and they all found it instantly with search disabled.
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