Live data from Hacker News

Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

transformer-circuits.pub

1–10 of 128 posts

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#2
This reminds me of how people often communicate to avoid offending others. We tend to soften our opinions or suggestions with phrases like "What if you looked at it this way?" or "You know what I'd do in those situations." By doing this, we subtly dilute the exact emotion or truth we're trying to convey. If we modify our words enough, we might end up with a statement that's completely untruthful. This is similar to how AI models might behave when manipulated to emphasize certain features, leading to responses that are not entirely genuine.

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#3
>what the model is "thinking" before writing its response

An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output and/or further compress its sensory history.

An LLM is doing exactly nothing while waiting for the next prompt.

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#4

>what the model is "thinking" before writing its response An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output and/or further compress its sensory history. An LLM is doing exactly nothing while waiting for the next prompt.

Why does the timing of the “thinking” matter?

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#5

>what the model is "thinking" before writing its response An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output and/or further compress its sensory history. An LLM is doing exactly nothing while waiting for the next prompt.

I disagree with this. That suggests that thinking requires persistent, malleable and non-static memory. That is not the case. You can reasonably reason about without increasing knowledge if you have a base set of logic.

I think the thing you were looking for was more along the lines of a persistent autonomous agent.

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#6

This reminds me of how people often communicate to avoid offending others. We tend to soften our opinions or suggestions with phrases like "What if you looked at it this way?" or "You know what I'd do in those situations." By doing this, we subtly dilute the exact emotion or truth we're trying to convey. If we modify our words enough, we might end up with a statement that's completely untruthful. This is similar to h…

Counterpoint: "What if you looked at it this way?" communicates both your suggestion AND your sensitivity to the person's social status whatever. Given that humans are not robots, but social, psychological, animals, such communication is entirely justified and efficient.

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#7

>what the model is "thinking" before writing its response An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output and/or further compress its sensory history. An LLM is doing exactly nothing while waiting for the next prompt.

Right, it's not doing anything between prompts, but each prompt is fed through each of the transformer layers (I think it was 96 layers for GPT-3) in turn, so we can think of this as a fixed N-steps of "thought" (analyzing prompt in hierarchical fashion) to generate each token.

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#9

This reminds me of how people often communicate to avoid offending others. We tend to soften our opinions or suggestions with phrases like "What if you looked at it this way?" or "You know what I'd do in those situations." By doing this, we subtly dilute the exact emotion or truth we're trying to convey. If we modify our words enough, we might end up with a statement that's completely untruthful. This is similar to h…

Counterpoint: "What if you looked at it this way?" communicates both your suggestion AND your sensitivity to the person's social status whatever. Given that humans are not robots, but social, psychological, animals, such communication is entirely justified and efficient.

You can't always do both to the fullest truth. They often conflict. To do what you suggest, would imply my feelings perfectly align with the sympathetic view. That is not the case for a lot of humans or instances. If I am not saying exactly how I feel it is watered down.

And telling me "just do both" is enforcing your world view and that is precisely what we're talking about _not_ doing.

Re: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

#10
post #4

>what the model is "thinking" before writing its response An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output and/or further compress its sensory history. An LLM is doing exactly nothing while waiting for the next prompt.

Why does the timing of the “thinking” matter?

thinking is generally considered an internal process, without input/output (of tokens), though some people decide to output some of that thinking into a more permanent form

I see thinking as less about "timing" and more about a "process"

What this post seems to be describing is more about where attention is paid and what neurons fire for various stimuli

Post reply on HN