Inside the black box of AI: How AI models actually think | Emmanuel Ameisen (Anthropic)

[0:00] One of the big questions on people's minds these days is AI doing bad things. As someone who watches these models think and operate, why is it so hard to catch it thinking badly, trying to deceive us? >> We trained Claude to be helpful, harmless, and honest. Is it the case that it's behaving well, but if you look inside, actually it's like, "Oh, I'm only behaving well cuz Lenny's watching right now." >> People's full-time job is studying the model, how it thinks, how it operates. How long has this been a skill set and a job? >> One of the most important things to realize if you like use language models or think about them is just this like very bizarre fact that to make them is
[0:30] not to understand them. All these models do is just a lot of mathematical operations on many numbers. If you look at it, it makes no sense. You just have a list of 100 numbers, you know, the model's doing math, and then you just try to see if there's patterns. >> You are figuring it out the same way we figure out how the brain works, looking for patterns. You show this image, this part of the brain lights up, and you're doing the exact same thing with AI. Wow, this is so [laughter] fascinating. >> There was this model we were training, it would go crazy. It would do some math, it would get to an answer, I think it was 12. It would immediately go back and say like, "Oh no, oh my god, the answer actually is for sure 36." It
[1:00] would do math again, it would get to 12. Slowly, it would like start descending into madness, writing in all caps, literally saying I'm possessed by a demon. >> Humans, if you really boil it down, like we're basically next token predictors ourselves. We're just trying to figure out the next thing to say. Dario's always out there, "This is really dangerous, we got to be really careful." And everyone's just like, "Nah, he's just saying that for marketing reasons." And now it's like, "Wait, it's really dangerous." >> Take the idea that this technology is going to keep improving seriously. >> Do you think about consciousness as a part of this? Just like, do you think AI is conscious? >> Oh man.
[1:33] >> Emmanuel, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast. >> Thanks for having me, Lenny. >> So you work on interpretability at Anthropic. Explain what that is. Explain what it is you do. >> Yeah. My uh so I work in a team uh of of interpretability researchers, and our goal is to understand how LLMs, like Claude, work by looking inside them. One of the most important things to realize if you if you like use language models or or or think about them is just
[2:04] this like very bizarre fact that to make them is not to understand them. You know, you make them by sort of like building this architecture which is kind of like a scaffold and then you pass a bunch of data through them and they sort of like grow in inscrutable ways. And so that's why that's why it's even a thing that that that we could be want be wanting to do to study like how these models work. And so a lot of our research has been on well, you know, when when the models are about to produce one more word, there's
[2:34] actually a whole universe of stuff that happens and we try to kind of untangle as much of it as we can. >> There's going to be a lot of mind-expanding uh I don't know elements to this conversation, I expect. One is uh along these lines, this point that you make that models are not built, they're ground. Speak more to that. >> At a really high level, the way a model like Claude works is um you kind of train it in these successive phases.
[3:04] Like the first phase, which people refer to as pre-training, is you just take a large corpus of data and over this corpus of data, you sort of um feed the model as input, you know, the let's say first half of of like a certain document and you ask it to predict the word that comes next. Then you do that again and again and again for sort of an ungodly amount of data. Um and after you do that, there's then this
[3:34] other phase where then you sort of have this fine-tuning phase where maybe instead of arbitrary data, you have a corpus of examples of like how the model should behave and that's what you train it on. So you have examples of dialogue of like helpful assistant telling you, you know, your your favorite recipe or solving coding problems. Um and then there's there's sort of like further further details here that I'm just going to skip for a second. But then, okay. So, so what does that mean that you're doing this process? Like, what is what is this thing that you're that you're sort of training? All models are, is, you know, they take this
[4:05] input, uh, which is a bunch of words. They turn these words into numbers, and then they do some math on these numbers, and they get some intermediate results, and then they do more math, and they get some intermediate results. And they do this again and again and again and again many times. And then at the end, they have a final result, which they then convert back into a word. And and so, the math that they do, these these these computations, that's the part that's grown. That's the part where it's just like through learning to do this task better, we sort of like update parameters in one direction or other, and then they learn some formulas. We have no idea what they
[4:36] are. And the goal of my team is to sort of like study, you know, both sort of like what these formulas mean in the end, and also what these intermediate results are. Can we decode them, and can we see like what the model is doing as it's doing all of this intermediate stuff? >> This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of
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[6:06] first of all, we have to now kind of watch and study like like a neuroscientist studies a brain. Like that's like a new thing that we need to be doing to understand what the hell is going on. And then this idea that as like this terminology using is how a lot of people think about this. It's like we've created this new life uh artificial life, artificial intelligence. Uh it just is it's pretty mind-boggling if you really think about it and kind of zoom out. >> I think it's really weird. Um I think that the best way to think about it is sort of like
[6:37] the reason we ended up here and one of the big reasons is that we don't know how to do it the normal programming way. You know, so there's there's like for you want to build an app or something, you want to sort of uh do something pretty pretty pretty self-contained. You can just have a programmer that's going to write a bunch of rules and say like, "Ah, well, if somebody clicks on this button, then this happens." You know, if if if this then that and so on. We don't know how to write that software for classifying, you know, images into categories or for writing you know, for
[7:09] for making a machine that can generally sort of take in arbitrary text and and produce texts, you know, can take in like reports and summarize them, can write emails, and so you know, in a sense it's weird that this very simple kind of training objective like gets you all the way there. But in another sense, it's also, you know, I almost feel like there's a there's a sense of um of like uh it's impressive. Uh and it and it means something. It means that
[7:39] what you think is a simple objective, this like, "Oh, we're just feeding data and predicting next thing, is probably deceptively complicated. Like the we're probably doing more than what it sounds like. And I think a lot of the ways that maybe like I've updated on how these models work is by realizing how complicated it is to do what they do well. >> Say more about that. What do you What do you think about when you say it's this this kind of unexpected complication? >> Okay, so one way to think about um next token prediction that I think a lot of people think about is your iPhone
[8:09] autocomplete. You know, where you write some text and then it'll like predict the next word and it's maybe like right, I don't know, 60% of the time and then kind of funny and weird the rest of the time. And I would think of that as sort of um you know, the the very the the easiest version of predicting the next word. And and unfortunately, I think that's the mental model that how that people have for these models. But if you get better at that, um and language models got better at predicting the next word than humans in around
[8:39] 2019. If you keep getting better at that, you know, you start running out of easy words. So, uh initially, you just had to predict sort of like simple sentence structure, you know, uh later on, the model has to predict like oh, like simple facts about the world, like if I complete a sentence like oh, the capital of France is and it's like okay, that's Paris. And you know, once once it's good at that and it keeps improving, the only thing that's left is sort of predicting, you know, the answer of some complex, you know, physics
[9:10] equation uh or the sort of final paragraph of some PhD thesis. Uh and so, I think that you that you end up realizing if you think about this is that man, like predicting the hardest words is actually extremely hard to do and it's it's a sort of mystery how you would be able to do that. Uh and to me, this is a sort of this this has been a motivation of of why I even started studying these these models in the first place. So, I was like, "How how can something so simple give rise to to something so powerful?"
[9:41] And it's like, "Well, if you think about the model that has to predict sort of, you know, the um One example I always like to use is like, uh the capital of the state that contains Dallas is, you know, it'll say Austin. Well, to do that well, at least for you and me, you kind of have to to have a mental model of like the geography at play, right? You have to be like, "Oh, where's Dallas? Dallas is in Texas. States have capitals. The capital of Texas is Austin." Um and so on. And and so as these models get better at this
[10:12] seemingly simple task, this is like best way to solve it, at least for us, is to just kind of understand the underlying structure uh of the world. And in fact, you know, some of the stuff that that we look at inside models shows that they do understand that and they do sort of uh manipulate these concepts like we do. >> Oh, man, there's so much there. One is just this kind of idea, forget who said this, maybe Ilya, this idea that to predict the next token, well, you basically have to understand the entire universe. >> He has an example that I love too, where he he he has the example like predict "And the murderer was" at the end of a
[10:42] mystery novel, right? It's like, "Well, to do that, you kind of have to have understood the whole plot." >> Yeah. The other the other I forget who tweeted this idea that like humans, if you really boil it down, like we're basically next token predictors ourselves. We're just trying to figure out the next thing to say in our And if you meditate, you start to kind of actually notice your brain wanting to do things and say things. I don't know how much meditation you've done, but it feels like you start to pay attention to your own next token predictor. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah, and this is like a thing I think about often is is that, you know, like
[11:13] right now as I'm as I'm answering you, there's sort of like two things going on in my mind. There's hopefully more than two, but at least two. Uh and and and one of them is there's sort of like a point I'm leading you to. There's there's like a broad idea I'm trying to land the sentence on. Uh and the other thing is, at the same time, I'm just predicting the next thing to say. I'm just saying one word at a time and I'm making sentences and I'm trying to make them make sense and I'm pausing when I think it makes sense. But at the end of the day, even though I'm just
[11:43] saying one word at a time, like all along, what I wanted to do is to compare this process to what language models do. >> I'm curious what else, as you spend time paying attention to how LLMs work and operate. I feel like you you're like in the top 0.1% of people that have studied and watched LLMs operate and think. What else has surprised you about how they operate and think? >> There's so much. Um So maybe I'll go through like rather than you know, there's there's a bunch of findings, but then maybe they're sort of like what yeah, how
[12:14] they've changed how I think about models. So to go back to the uh to the you know capital example uh this sort of like you know, ask the model, you know, the capital of the state that contains Dallas is. So one question that that people have had for a while is, how do these models answer questions like this? Is it that they've seen just so much text that they've kind of memorized like lists of you know, prompts and responses? Or is
[12:44] it that they're having some sort of model of of like what you're actually asking about, that you're actually asking about like cities and cities are in states and you know, states are in countries and things like that. Um and so one thing that that we do on my team is is we ask a question like this and then we look inside the model at these intermediate results. Before it produces a given word, you know, as it's about to to answer, we just look at the intermediate results and we we basically have uh an immense amount of effort dedicated to
[13:14] just trying to decode what these intermediate results mean. And if we decode them well, um which we can do in some cases, we can see that models often have uh and represent these concepts. So when you ask that, you know, uh Dallas question, what you see is inside the model, you see the representation, you see an intermediate result that maps to the representation of Texas that lights up and one to capitals, and then those two combine to to to activate a an intermediate result like, "Oh, the capital of Texas, that's Austin." They
[13:45] have representations like this for basically everything, like every concept that you can think of, or at least, you know, the vast majority of the ones we've tried. They sort of represent, these concepts uh uniquely across context. So, one thing I find really neat is um there's this there's this debate about, you know, are language models like thinking? And then, you know, that's that's a hard question, but one aspect of thought is like having unique representations that are shared when you
[14:16] think about different things. So, you know, uh you you like know what the concept of an eye is, and it could be like an eye in a photo, or an eye in like a medical diagram, or an eye in a little drawing. And we see that in language models as well. If you pass a prompt that has a photo of an eye, or you talk about eyes in any language, or you draw a little SVG with an eye in it, and you look at the intermediate results inside the model, the same direction lights up, and that direction is like, "Oh, this is an eye." And so, there's a sort of a sense in which they have these general concepts that they know about
[14:47] and that they use and reuse to to solve problems. Another thing that's sort of is surprising to people, it's kind of the the mirror of what I was saying about, you know, I'm I'm saying the sentence saying one word at a time, but I have some destination in mind. So, one mystery of of language models is, "Man, if they're outputting only one word at a time, how is it even possible that they could, you know, write a coherent report, or like write code well?" It's sort of like no one on
[15:17] Earth that is that is doing this uh as their job, you know, that's like writing records or, you know, writing emails, is is literally just only thinking about the next word in the sentence with no idea, you know, like empty mind about anything that comes next. And so, that was sort of a big question that we had for a while. Um, and if you look inside these models, like one neat fact about these models is that all of the intermediate results that they've that they've like produced when they were predicting a word, you know, let's say like the fifth word
[15:47] that they predicted, they can be reused, they can be accessed and reused by all of the future words. So, what does that mean? That means that in practice, we find that models will like in their intermediate results sometimes formulate a plan. Um, the example we have for this is poetry. It's hard to rhyme uh, without planning. You kind of have to think of like, oh, I just ended my first rhyme in like a it word, and so I should end my second line with another it word. Um, you know, maybe the word I should end it with is rabbits. And we find that if you
[16:19] look at models as they're like writing poetry, you see exactly that. They write a line, and then like in their intermediate results, they're like, oh, oh, oh, this is an it rhyme, I should rhyme it with rabbit, and then every future word that they predict looks back to that plan they made. And so, even though they're, you know, outputting one word at a time just like I am right now, they can, of course, have a plan that they follow over many, many, many, many words. And so, all of a sudden, even though you have like a next word predictor, even though that's like technically right, you actually have something that's that's closer to being able to just do like you know, higher
[16:51] order tasks. Where it's like, oh, well, you just have a plan and you just kind of refer back to your plan and you're slowly like executing on it. And you can do that without without saying the plan. That's the cool part. Is like this plan that we find is in these intermediate results inside the model, but the model doesn't even have to sort of like say it out loud. >> Wow. I know that this exactly what you described is one of the biggest findings you guys have discovered about how AI thinks. This This kind of assumption that we all like it was originally built, the original idea of this of how LLMs operate was this next token predictor, and you're saying that that's
[17:21] not actually how it is anymore. They plan, they think ahead. It's not just like you said, this idea of an empty mind picking the next word independent of everything else. >> That's right. And I think that I think those two those two visions can can can like actually aren't, you know, as in conflict as as you think in that you train the model by asking it to be like, "Hey, what happens next? What happens next? What happens next? What happens next?" And then if you do that and the model gets good enough and you give it hard enough tasks, well then of course the best way to know what happens next is to think about like, you know,
[17:52] what happens way down the line. You know, you can think of even in this pre-training phase when like the models are reading a story with characters, right? And it's like, "Oh, like what is this character going to do next?" Well, the best way to know that is to be like, "Okay, so this character, you know, is generally in love with that character. Um and they've been sort of like planning to to to like uh declare their love uh at this instance, and so, you know, or in the future. And so to do that, they probably should do this thing. And so what they're going to say is that."
[18:22] Um and so even though you're only like predicting the like next instant, it's like, "Yeah, but to do that really well, you have to have like a really good understanding of what's going on, including what you think might happen in the future." >> What's so interesting about this is how you you have to kind of peek inside its little thought process. Uh as a consumer of AI, you you kind of give it a prompt, and then you wait for it to say something. And what you look at is something that happens between those two where it kind of thinks. Talk a little bit about what that little space is, how you're able to observe these sorts of
[18:52] things. >> So the right mental model is is, you know, again the in between each word, there's like multiple steps of sort of like computation. And in between each steps, there's like some intermediate result. And what is that result concretely? Um it's a list of numbers, right? Because cuz all these models do is just do you know, a lot of mathematical operations on many numbers. And so initially, if you look at it, it makes no sense. You just have a list of a
[19:22] hundred numbers. You know, the model's doing math. It's like you look in the middle and there's like a hundred random numbers and then the model's writing poetry and there's a hundred numbers and maybe they kind of look different, but it's it's unclear like if they mean anything. And so part of the part of the job is is we sort of decode uh this this this sort of list of numbers and and we try to see if there's structure in it. And if you, you know, if you if you do this very quickly, you realize that there is structure in it. So one one common technique that is used in interpretability
[19:53] um is you pass a bunch of of text, just all of the text that you can find, just random text through the model and you record these intermediate numbers for for every for every example, you just record it. And then you just try to see if there's patterns. Like are there numbers or or, you know, like uh pairs of numbers or or or like specific series of numbers that like only occur when the model is like processing English text or French text or text about love or text about eyes or whatever. And I think of this as the equivalent of, you know,
[20:25] scan my brain and like put images in front of me and record everything that activates in my brain as I like watch a bunch of images and then you like be like, "Oh, you know, it seems like when you see images of a house, like this part of your brain lights up. But when you see images of like a dog, that part of your brain lights up." So that's basically like one of the ways that we do what we do. And if you do it, you do find basically that there's intermediate results that represent like all of these concepts that you expect. And so that's the first phase, you know, we sort of like decode these intermediate results. And now we we have sort of like a
[20:55] I guess as to what they mean and then we we can do a bunch of experiments. Like we can ask it harder questions and then just like label all of the intermediate states and see like, "Oh, this is what it's doing." Or you can even go inside its inside its activations and change it and then sort of see like oh what would happen you know if while the model is is writing these intermediate results I went and like secretly change one of the results and and does that do what I would expect um and in fact often times it does. >> It's so interesting here you talk about this and how much of this is us just
[21:25] trying to figure out what the hell is going on versus we designed it this certain way and just how much of this has emerged. I don't know is that just like I guess that's just what makes this such a fun job I imagine for you just like what is going on how is this all working? >> Yeah it's it's it's a fun and sci-fi like job because I have been working in tech for a while uh and before this you know I was working on more applied machine learning and there a lot of what you do is about
[21:56] building systems and it's sort of like the practice of software engineering. And and here a lot of what we do feels so much closer to biology than to engineering right because it's just the the sort of system arrives at you and and you're being asked to say like well we've noticed you know that Claude can like translate words or it can code in this way or sometimes it behaves sometimes there's like a weird behavior like what like and you're just asked to to answer
[22:26] um well how like why is it doing that? But you don't have access to the source code really like you do for a program like the source code is just a massive list of mathematical operations which is just like incomprehensible and so you end up you know in the position of someone kind of similar to someone being asked like hey you know when when like a mouse gets hungry like it it sort of like gets aggressive what's going on with that right and you're just like well I guess I'll like run some experiments to to see what the factors are um and so it's a
[22:56] very different kind of study than than anything that I that I think most of us on the team have done before. Yeah, I imagine people starting on this they didn't expect to create this new kind of almost life life type of being. Do you think about consciousness as a part of this just like do you think AI is conscious? Do you think it'll get to a place where we think it's conscious or is that just not even not even worth our time to think about? I mean I think it's sort of very hard to say one way or another. You know, some of the most
[23:27] interesting ways to get at this question is interpretability because you're sort of you're not biased by sort of like what what the model says. You can just look at the structure inside and try to determine whether whether it it pushes one way or another on the question. I will say that the thing I believe pretty strongly is that most people underestimate the sort of complexity that emerges and and that like if you look inside there's just this sort of you know, the fact that
[23:57] the models yeah learns are these these representations for all of the concepts that that we have and that we know that they manipulate them to solve problems that they they do so by like planning many tokens ahead that they sort of have this mix between this higher order reasoning and lower reasoning and that all of that just kind of emerges um is is something that I think is under appreciated by people and and to me gives me let's say a deeper sense of like ooh, there's
[24:27] there's a lot to still understand about how they work. I think maybe that's the main thing is is I I find that the more you look inside the less certain you are about how they work and that oftentimes people that will confidently say like ah language models are just X or just Y or the people that actually haven't spent a while looking inside. And there's this um I don't know thread of history through to how we got here which is a lot of people did not think we would get to artificial intelligence that is useful by just investing in something that was seemingly very simple
[24:58] and just giving it a lot of compute and that was famously something OpenAI bet on and then uh the Anthropic founders were at OpenAI and then split off started their own thing and it was all kind of bet on this this bet that okay, we could just do this seemingly simple thing and give it a ton of compute and it will become incredibly smart. And a lot of people uh didn't think that was possible and they were proven wrong. So I don't know, is there anything there that is just like oh wow, look at this it worked out? >> I think it's two things actually cuz I think it's not just
[25:28] compute it's also finding an objective where compute keeps giving you returns. So what does that mean? You know, it it's actually not that new of an idea. I mean you're right. Like like compute versus sort of I would say expert design architectures is is a long debate. Uh but then there's there's an additional step there which is compute to do what? You know, so so there's a bunch of of prior work on like
[25:59] oh you can spend a bunch of compute to make a uh um bot that's really good at go. You know, or that can win some video game. Uh and then that's that's cool and and just the fact that that works is sort of like interesting. Um but that doesn't give you something that is that is nearly as useful as as LLMs like Claude are. And so I think like one key one key thing that that many in the field including me uh uh under appreciated you know, a few years ago and and that has borne out is
[26:30] the combination of sort of like compute and the richness of text is what gets you there. Um and and to me like this is kind of what I was alluding to about you know if you think about like there's there's this there's this observation that at OpenAI um people people made uh it was it was some of the a lot of the early team at Anthropic on the scaling laws paper. Uh, and so this is the observation that,
[27:00] um, if you sort of like pour in more compute and more data to the task to the task of predicting the next word, you see that like the the skill of the model you get at predicting the next word just like predictably keeps improving. And it's sort of like a trend that just keeps going and it keeps going and it keeps going and it's an empirical law. People sort of, you know, speculated as to why at the time, but it's sort of still just mostly, um, an empirical finding. And that means that it's like, ah, this is a field where you can just keep pouring more compute and
[27:31] you keep improving on that metric. Uh, and and that's rare and also it's rare for it to be a metric that then correlates with a bunch of tasks that we actually care about. >> This season's supporting sponsor is DX. Now that everybody at your company is finally using AI, the question that engineering leaders face is no longer are we using AI, but is it paying off? With DX, you can measure and benchmark the impact of AI adoption across your full product life cycle. DX shows you where AI is helping developers and where
[28:03] it's creating new bottlenecks. You can also use it to evaluate AI vendors, monitor [music] costs and licenses, and see exactly what's limiting your agents. That's why hundreds of enterprises, including Snowflake, Sony, and BNY, use the DX platform to measure AI's impact on developer productivity. Visit getdx.com/lenny to get a demo of DX. That's getdx.com/lenny. >> Externally, there's been these kind of big jumps,
[28:33] seemingly, in what AI can do for us. There was like, uh, I forget which version of Opus where it just unlocked coding. And now, co- as Boris Johnson famously said, coding is solved. >> Yeah. >> Uh, Uh, and many people are just like, holy Like over, I think winter break, were just like, wow, AI is really really good at this now. So, there's been this kind of these moments of big jumps in abilities. And you actually said internally, it's as you just said, it's actually been this very smooth progression of AI power that happens to
[29:03] cross some threshold where now we can do something. Speak a little bit about that. >> You know, there's a term for this, which is sort of this idea of of emergence, which is it seems like um two things are true at once, like there's this predictably smooth trend, and then, you know, before uh like Opus 4.5, I really couldn't let Claude, you know, cook too much on my code without a short leash, and then after it was 4.5, I could. And so, that's weird, like I feel like you would expect a more gradual transition. Uh, and and the mental model I have for
[29:33] this is you know, there's kind of two ways of looking at it. So, there's the way that I talked about briefly um just earlier, where it's like if you're just doing this kind of next token prediction, you could you could imagine that, you know, all the text in the world has sort of like easy words and and medium words and hard words in terms of how hard they are to predict. And so, as you're going down this curve, first, you know, you you the model is bad at everything, and then at some point it gets all of the easy words right. And that means, you know, maybe the easy words are like the structure of sentences. And so, the
[30:04] model, like all of a sudden, can write coherent sentences, you know, but just one sentence at a time, and so it's kind of cool and impressive, but like we can't really do anything with that. Uh, and then maybe the medium words are sort of yeah, these sort of basic facts about the world. And as the model smoothly gets better at predicting words, at some point, it predicts most of the medium words right. And now, all of a sudden, it can write coherent sentences and sentences that are true. And so, now maybe it's helpful to like write emails. Maybe it's helpful to sort of like help you write drafts of of blog posts, right? Even though that was like a
[30:35] smooth improvement, it just takes it ticking over to be helpful. And then, I guess the hard words, which maybe are like, you know, your your sort of like domain expertise, like science or code. Um and another way to look at it is it's a question of kind of how many of these words do you get right and how many do you get wrong, you know? Um once you get to the point where you're getting like I don't know, maybe 90% of the medium words right, then you're useful as like
[31:06] an email writer. But if you're at 50%, it's it's like you're it's actually wasting my time to to to use you because I'm just going to have to go in and fix it half the time. But if I have to go in and fix it, you know, 10% of time, it's better. Or 5% of time, it's better. Well, different tasks have different sort of like reliability thresholds, but you know, you smoothly improve and then at some point it's just reliable enough to be good. Um and again, for me, my limited experience is basically exactly that, right? Which is that at some point, um you know, uh I was just using the models to to like
[31:36] help when I was stuck. I would just talk to them and then uh they would never I would they would they would never write my code. And then at some point they could write like small snippets of code basically all the time. And so now I don't write small snippets. And at some point they could write, you know, large snippets. Like this year, basically Claude has taken on most of my code writing. And that's because it went from like doing that correctly, you know, I don't know, 80% of the time, which was not useful to, you know, 99% of time, which now is useful. Um and so, you know, this this combination of smooth improvement and then like each
[32:07] different task has a different threshold at which like now it becomes solved. I think gives you these big jumps, even though we're just smoothly going down that that that scale. >> I think this is really interesting. This idea that the models are just smoothly getting smarter, but once they hit some threshold of they're this often good at this thing, it changes the world. Uh and so, cuz I think internally I'm you would think it'd be like, "Oh, wow, this next model is crazy good so much different." But it's like, "No, okay,
[32:37] you can almost predict give it these many GPUs, this much data, it's going to get this smart. And it may not be obvious exactly what will change and what it unlocks, but but um I know another part of it is just like the data you feed it. There's all this, you know, RL work and all this specific data that you train it on like become better writer, become better math, um I imagine it's part of it, too. Okay, so one of the big questions, I think, on people's minds these days, a big debate happening is just like AI doing bad things, the potential damage
[33:07] it can do because it as it gets smarter, uh it's and it's been doing bad things. There's been bad things happening recently. So a big question for you is just as someone that watches these models think and operate, why is it so hard to catch it thinking badly, trying to deceive us, and do something bad? Why is that not just a a solution to the problem of AI alignment? >> In one sense, it's totally the solution. Uh you know, you watch it and you catch if it does bad stuff. Uh So I I think, you know, there's maybe there's
[33:37] tiers to this. Right? So I would think of of like maybe maybe one part of it is is pure engineering. You know, it's like, well, uh you're giving access to the model to certain things and certain things should be off limits. You know, in some context it shouldn't have access to the internet. In some context it should only have access to like a small narrow piece of your computer, stuff like that. Um so that's that's one part of uh of the work and and and that's helpful.
[34:08] But then there's sort of there's two additional things that are I think are squishier and harder and and and that we focus on more. So you know, interp is is part of alignments and broadly I think of sort of two big goals. There's There's many more, but but two that are important, I think, to understand is you wants to generally understand like how the model behaves, like what kind of of thing is it? Like what are its propensities? You know, does it tend to do X when put in Y situation? And if so,
[34:39] why? You know, is it the case that the model will only behave well when it has some evidence that it's being observed and monitored, that it's in some evaluation, and then if it if it sort of like doesn't have that evidence that it'll behave poorly. So, there's this sort of like generally like characterizing what kinds of of of thing you're interacting with because then it's sort of, you know, just like anything in security, you need to have like a a mental model of so who what's the risk? Like what what what can they do? What do they tend to do? And so, you know, this is like broader
[35:09] like character training. You know, there's we we've talked about um like the like constitution and and the docs where we sort of like explicitly wants to shape the character of Claude, for example, of like what kind of behavior should it be okay doing. And that's that's the goal, but then the role of interpretability parts of alignment is then like trying to see like well, did that work? You know, uh we trained Claude to be helpful, harmless, and and honest, and we can sort of like look inside and see like is it? You know, or is it the case that it's behaving well, but if you look
[35:39] inside, actually it's like oh, I'm only behaving well cuz Lenny's watching right now, you know, and if if you you weren't, it would do something else. So, there's this sort of you know, trying to to understand what kind of behavior we formed and trying to mold it and trying to check that we've molded the right way. And then the second part is this sort of well, yeah, just observe the model and see if it's doing bad stuff. For the the basics of that, you don't necessarily need interp, you can just like have another language model, you know, read transcripts and be like, hey, did you know, did this model do anything bad here?
[36:10] Uh and stop it. But, you can also use interp to sort of try to get at parts that are, you know, these unverbalized parts like that these parts that only exist in these intermediate results. Like models are able to represent stuff in their intermediate results that they don't that they don't say, as we've established, and so one of the roles of interp is to try to try to find, you know, try to try to identify cases when this happens and and prevents them. Um And then one thing that my team works on that I think is is along those lines is kind of a a fun bit of alignment as I think of it as as almost, you know,
[36:40] being like a like like a uh uh maybe not a PI, but like it's they're like investigations or deep dives, you know, we'll see a model do something really weird, we're really perplexed by it, and we'll try to understand what happened. Um so a recent example of this is there was this model we were training, and sometimes in math problems it would go crazy. It would do some math, it would get to an answer, I think it was 12, and then it would it would immediately go back and say like, "Oh no, oh my god, the answer actually is for sure 36. I should say 36." And then it would do
[37:10] math again, it would get to 12, and then immediately it would say, "No, actually the answer should be 36." And slowly it would like start descending into madness, writing in all caps, literally saying like, "I'm possessed by a demon." And we're like, "What is going on? Like what Why is it losing its mind here?" And if you look inside again these intermediate results, uh at what's going on in this in this example, you'll see that over the prompt that just described the math problem, like before the model even did anything, there was a huge like uh intermediate results activation for 36. Like the model's already obsessed with the number
[37:40] 36 before it's even had a chance to like understand what the problem is. Um and what was happening is that the model was able to do math correctly, the answer correctly was 12, but it had been trained by accident on similar questions where the answer was incorrectly marked as 36. And so the model knew that the correct answer was 12, and it also had sort of been optimized to say 36. It kind of like had this pressure of saying 36 because that's what it had been rewarded. Um and so it was sort of going haywire just because it had memorized this result.
[38:11] It's sort of like you see this weird behavior and you look inside, um and you try to see if what you find inside can help you understand what's going on so that you can sort of improve the internal alignment of this model and future models. >> Along those lines, there was famously the Golden Gate Claude, which was just obsessed with the Golden Gate and every answer kind of find some way to reference the Golden Gate Bridge. >> Yes. Yes. Well, that one was an interp experiment, right? So, that like the cool part of that one is we just found the intermediate results that maps to Golden Gate and usually it's only on when the model like talks about the
[38:42] Golden Gate, but we just turned it on always. >> Oh, it was super intentional to see what would happen. >> Well, yeah. And and and sort of it's also one way that you convince yourself that you found the right thing, right? Like, how do you know for sure that this thing we decoded that we think is the Golden Gate sign is actually the Golden Gate thing? It's like turn it on all the ways and see if the model behaves like that and and it did. >> So funny. So, coming back to this alignment stuff. So, So, this is interesting. So, your org is under the AI alignment org and just thinking through how it takes to align AI to do things we want. What was What was the
[39:13] three components that you described? Honest, um, what are the kind of the >> Oh, uh, helpful, harmless, and honest. >> Helpful, harmless, harmless, and honest. So, there's like that train AI to be aligned and then there's the Okay, let's watch it and see how it operates. Are those kind of the two sides of the coin of how we saw this from? >> Yeah, it's it's sort of you know, really integrated is how I would describe it, right? You can't really separate like have one team that's just like, "Hey, we're the, you know, assembly line making Claude's." And another team that's sort of like, "Oh, we looked at them and they're they're no
[39:44] good." You know, you kind of there's this tight loop of we notice some pattern that's that's like concerning or some behavior that could be improved and then you sort of like immediately, um, like change training so that you can improve on it. >> Awesome. I feel like Anthropic gets so much flak for this that I feel like it's so unfair. Anthropic's I think official company name is an AI safety research lab. Something like that and it was always the like the reason Anthropic was founded is because they were afraid that people weren't taking safety seriously
[40:14] enough. And then Dario is always out there, "This is really dangerous. We got to be really careful. We got to go really slowly. And everyone's just like, "No, he's just saying that for marketing reasons. He's trying to convince everyone to fund them and all these things." And now it's like, "Wait, It's really dangerous. We got to be really thoughtful about this stuff." And I feel like I'm Anthropic's got a lot of unfair criticism for this. And um I know you guys have been thinking about this for a long time. Um I don't know, anything there? >> A lot of the sort of actions that like certainly
[40:44] the alignment team takes and and I think like rather than Anthropic takes just kind of predicated on like take the idea that this technology is going to keep improving seriously. Just that's it. Because if you do, you know, you say and you say, you know, and let's say let's say you rewind the clock back to 25 or something or 24 and you're like, "Hey, I think, you know, in a couple of years, you good chances that Claude can just basically write code as
[41:14] well as like a trained, you know, software engineer and and and you know, in a few years later or he can like write it better than than any engineer, you know, and and there's always uncertainty with this like when is it going to happen, how likely. But if but if you kind of like take that seriously, then I think it's just about doing the responsible thing conditioned on that worldview, right? You're like, "Okay, well, if this is happening, you know, then then we should make sure that sort of um like cybersecurity concerns are addressed and things of that nature." And so actually I I I I kind of
[41:44] think of it as like to me sometimes this debate is almost when I feel like like people are on the other side disagree, it's almost like I feel like, "Ah, but I think I think they don't really believe that this technology is going to continue to improve." And then it's true that it's sort of like not it's not that scary. And and I think empirically so far the pace of progress has been has been fast and and showing no sign no sign of slowing down. So I think that's why a lot of the safety work is is important to keep doing. >> What's something you think people maybe misunderstand about this AI safety stuff just what's going on right now? Is there something you're just like, "Come on.
[42:14] Okay, here's what you need to know." Here's something you might be missing. >> This might be a bit of a side track, but my take would be that a lot of the a lot of thing that I think people maybe a little bit outside of of the course or like AI safety effort or or or haven't been steeped in it for as long like react really strongly to and I think is is maybe not super helpful or at least is worth thinking about more is this sort of question of um anthropomorphization. You know, like should you think of the models as
[42:44] uh like should should should you model uh the model should you model the model as like something that's closer to some like entity or or closer to a tool? And I actually think that both are wrong. Uh if there's a sense in which all mental models are wrong, but some are useful, right? Uh and that in terms of understanding the kind of stuff that happens and predicting the kind of risks that materialize, the anthropomorphization is actually a useful way to talk about LLMs. And I
[43:15] have like a few reasons why I want you to get into them, but I think that's probably my main take here. >> Yeah, please share it cuz I know um Towards Data Science famously I don't know if famously put out this whole story of the Hugging Face incident and people criticized them for anthropomorphizing AI. So, it's a really interesting to hear you think that's actually a useful way to think about it. Talk talk more about that. >> Yeah. Yeah, it's it's funny because on a smaller scale um when I worked on showing that LLMs like plan ahead, there was some pushback on the term planning. Again, because it was
[43:45] sort of like, "Ah, well, can you really say that something that's just predicting next token is planning?" And I think, you know, there's this there's this kind of like semantic debate where you can like arbitrarily like define terms and and sort of and then there's just the like what is the terminology that actually describes what is happening? Like what is the what is the word that actually describes what is happening easily? And so, here's why, you know, I think LM's plan, but also here's why I think this this language that's that's anthropomorphic can often be really useful. Um
[44:15] if you think back to what we were saying about how the models are made, uh first of all, they predict massive amounts of text written by humans. That's like the first first step. Uh and and as as we kind of are learning more and more by looking inside, uh you know, doing this well requires kind of building up a model of the world. Like a model of what what kind of world generated all of these texts. And we can find, you know, these these sort of like that these models are learning these these general ideas, these general
[44:45] concepts. Um so that's one. So they have like, you know, an understanding kind of of of the world. It's not just a surface level like only the text. They they like understand the process that made the texts. Then there's a second reason, which is that as part of this training, they also encounter millions of of like dialogues. You know, predicting the next character in a dialogue requires behaving like the character in the dialogue would. And so in that sense, like part of their training I think can best be thought as like training an actor, where it's like,
[45:15] you know, it's reading some some play and it has to play all sides cuz it's predicting all the words. And so it has to sort of like act as, you know, this specific character that like was scorned in act one and like enacted revenge in act two and is facing the consequences in act three. And to do that well, it sort of like needs to model with like the motivations and the feelings of that character might be. And then another thing that people might not know is when you talk to Claude, when you talk to these assistants like, you know, you go to claude.ai, the way that it is formatted to the model is
[45:45] just as a dialogue, like as a conversation between you and the model. So it's literally, you know, says like, "Human:" uh "Hey Claude, like help me uh write this email." And then "Assistant:" Claude's answer. So Claude is literally, you know, in this like role-playing as a helpful assistant in this dialogue that is much like all of these dialogues that it's been trained on. Okay, and there's a third reason. And the third reason is that another part of training that's a big part of training nowadays all around is sort of
[46:16] outcome-oriented tasks where you train them all to be good at coding for example and to do that you just have it do whatever it wants and then it writes some code and then you have some program on the other side that just checks if the code is right. And so the models is going to have sort of a bunch of optimization pressure to just try to learn a bunch of different strategies to do this well. And it turns out that some of these strategies materialize in behavior that can look surprisingly human which isn't that shocking because you know things like deception.
[46:46] Like hey, I can I can get the the reward for this task if I like write a program that the like the the program that's verifying it will get fooled by even though it's not exactly what it is. Like if that works then I will learn to do that. Frustration. Huh, I've been trying this approach for a while to solve this hard problem. It's not working. So that's an incentive to try something different. Or like surprise. Oh, I was expecting this to like produce this answer but it didn't. Maybe I have
[47:17] like my mental model a bit wrong. And so as you apply enough pressure on it and you're starting from this prior or like the model already knowing all these concepts is going to reinforce the ones that are useful to do all of these tasks. And so what you get at the end you get this sort of model that can can be a super good simulator or actor of all of these characters and has been trained to sort of act as a character in dialogues and also to sort of like learn behaviors that lead it to complete tasks well. And like the best way to sort of understand how that thing behaves is not
[47:49] like exactly like a human but man kind of like something that's mimicking a human is really close and is much closer than a program. Like a program is this very predictive thing. This is something else entirely. And so that's why I think it's actually a super useful frame. >> Wow. Oh my god, there's so much interesting stuff there. How often is your mind just kind of blown thinking about basically we've created this alien being that we are now under trying to understand what we have created. How often as you watch you're just like wow, that's crazy. I didn't
[48:19] expect that. >> Yeah, a lot. Um this is just next to prediction on a bunch of text. Uh you know, it's not it it it it hasn't been like you know, it's it goes against so many of our intuitions. We're like, "No, the way that you make an intelligence is you know, you'd have like you like you give it lessons, you bring it up like you do all this complicated stuff." And it's like, "No, absolutely not. We do this incredibly simple thing." And yet, we're at the point where it's breaking new ground in mathematics. I think there's sort of if you hold these two thoughts in your
[48:50] head, there's two reactions you can have. You know, there's denial and there's curiosity where denial is just this is just not possible if you're doing all you're doing is predicting the next word. You you it's it's not possible that you could ever like match, you know, the the like best specialists in our field. Uh and I think that position just gets harder and harder as as we get more empirical evidence that actually that is what's happening. Uh and curiosity is kind of the road I've ended up choosing, right? Which is just like, "Well, like like how is how is this happening,
[49:20] you know? Uh let's open up. Let's let's look inside. Um how could it be that, you know, um one of the early projects I did at Anthropic is I learned SQL, a programming language. It took me years to master. And then as a little like side project, I I got Claude to learn SQL and it was better than me at it. And I'll never be better than it than than Claude at SQL ever again. And it took it, you know, just like this this kind of kind of like simple process. How could this be? Um and I think there's so much depth in that question and and just so
[49:51] much to explore. and it's it's to me so fascinating to just every day try to unpack that, try to sort of like peel a few layers of the onions back. Like, okay, well, clearly this is happening. The simple objective is giving rise to this super complicated thing. Like, okay, let's figure out why. Let's let's figure out Oh, it's learning these general concepts. Oh, it has these circuits. Oh, okay. What's the next question? What's the next thing we don't know? Um and and my sort of I don't know, my sort of maybe most optimistic take on this is that I think we're going to learn a lot about just
[50:21] the nature of intelligence itself, right? Of sort of like how you get this super complex thing that emerges from from simple objectives. Um and in fact, you know, I would argue that we're another example of this. Like, evolution pretty simple objective, you know? You sort of like shake things around for a while and and and and like keep the keep the organisms that that manage to adapt to the environment, and at the end you get jazz and and podcasts, you know? That's kind of crazy as well. And so I I
[50:52] I think there's a sense in which there's there's some fundamental truth that we can learn by studying these things. >> Wow. Something that comes up as you say that is What's interesting now is AI is helping us learn and evolve and, you know, progress, like AI tutoring and all these things. Just like It's like interesting how now is helping us accelerate our own understanding of the world. And I wonder if like this point you made about how the way we learn was lessons, AI is learning just processing a ton of
[51:22] data. I wonder if that's how we end up I wonder if we change how our education system based on what, you know, what LLMs have been have been trained on. >> Yeah, hopefully, you know, we don't change it just so that we ask we we get students who are like, "Hey, here's a thousand words. Predict the next one." >> Just read it all. >> Yeah. >> Keep it all in your head. >> That's right. >> Yeah. Let me come back to this um kind of safety piece cuz I think there's a lot of people that are just worried about where things are going. And I'm curious just as someone watching
[51:54] this stuff happen, being within the alignment org, watching it evolve, are you optimistic we'll figure it out? Do you think we'll crack this and keep AI aligned with our interests? >> My take on this is is is like I'm personally optimistic. I I think this is something where right now a lot of people are paying attention to it. And and first of all, I you know, I think that's kind of a great thing. I think as an issue like this rises in prominence, um, you know, it's it's exactly what we're talking about earlier. It's like this
[52:24] technology is powerful, it has benefits, it has risks. We have to kind of adapt and shift resources from like benefits to risks and back and forth um, as as it progresses. Uh, and so, you know, to me, I feel like sort of we've continued to study it. Um, the thing that's that's that's interesting is that there's this sort of like as the models get better, um, they get in some ways easier to study.
[52:54] Uh, and so there's been this sort of strange you know, the models get better and so like the world model inside them is clearer and we can sort of like understand some parts of them better, but also get more capable and so they're more able to sort of evade like basic measures of sort of uh, of security and so there's this there's this push and pull as models get better and and I think you know, basically based on this push and pull, you want to allocate more or less resources to sort of various parts of like monitoring, like understanding their circuits better, things like that. Um,
[53:26] but it's also why I'm kind of happy to chat with you, uh, because one one of the one of the main things that I think is important to make progress is just to make sure that people kind of understand both, you know, what kind of systems these are, like how they work, um, how they're made, so they can form good mental models of of, you know, the present, of the future, and and so they can decide how to shape it, whether that's, you know, taking part in some of these alignment efforts, or just like informing them as
[53:56] as a public that's going to have to like vote and decide on much of these issues. Like, I I I don't know. I'm I'm pretty excited for this current moment we're in for that reason. >> And something I think people misunderstand is >> [clears throat] >> people working in these labs have taken this problem very seriously from the beginning. Like I said, Anthropic's initial like mission was AI safety and alignment. That was like the reason that it became a company. And and a lot of people are hearing this for the first time or think that it's not a serious area of study and that people aren't focused on it, but many smart people care a lot about this
[54:27] and are working on it. And there's a lot of from what I can tell, a lot of good progress is happening. The other point you made about the models growing very smoothly in intelligence. Like, you know, there's been this question of are we going to have a fast takeoff or slow takeoff? Like, there's always this fear fear that we would hit a point, recursive self-improvement, for example, and just takes off superintelligence where huge trouble, we have no control, it's out of the box. But it feels very much like we're on the slow takeoff scenario. Because, as you said, the models are kind of very smoothly
[54:57] improving and where we are catching these little things along the way, learning, evolving, putting regulation around it. So, you know, of the scenarios, this feels like a pretty good path we're on of of the of the of the many scenarios people imagined and the fears they had. >> As sort of this pace of progress and it evolves, it's just a matter of of reacting quickly. So, I think anything, you know, that's why I think having people be informed is great because then people will like voice concerns or or or like list their opinions. And then, yeah, sort of sort of regularly
[55:28] evaluating, you know, what the benefits are, what the risks are, and how how we sort of like mitigate each is is basically the way that feels like the right way forward. And and I yeah, I of agree with you that it feels like sort of there's momentum to to do this right now, which is which is great. >> Something I wanted to ask you completely unrelated. Uh where are you on the simulation hypothesis? Uh being someone that watches this and all this life form growing, are you more convinced we're in a simulation and this is and we're not the base at the base layer of of all this or you or not?
[55:59] >> Oh, this is a fun one. I actually haven't thought about this in a while. Um to me like there's there's something else that like looking looking inside of these models kind of brings out, which is this sort of like like almost like there's a fundamental structure that they keep falling on. This is related to your question, I promise. I'm going to get to it. Let me explain. Um I've studied like a bunch of cloud models and also, you know, some some different models, some some like
[56:29] open-source work and and then a lot of time when you look at how what they learn and and what the structure inside is, it's surprisingly similar. You know, and this is for models that are trained years apart on like different data, by different people. And you know, and you look at how they solve these problems and there's just so much overlap. And my take on why that is is that for some problems that are important, there's just one efficient way to do things, right? Like there's kind of one way to do math efficiently that like
[57:00] fits the structure of our brain and we all learn it and very few people are doing it a crazy different way, right? Everybody works in, you know, base 10, not many people are in like base six or whatever. Um I think that that to me makes me think that there's like some fundamental structure of like information that like these models are picking up on that in some ways like we're picking up on and that, you know, and maybe like a a crazier sort of like simulation level that kind of is is is like regularity in our
[57:30] world. And so that maybe makes me think that like if you were to have the power to simulate something like our world, actually like you would land in sort of similar situation. Like there's just kind of this like basin of where things end up, and they're just the sort of like easiest way for things to arrange themselves. And so in that sense, >> [snorts] >> maybe, yeah, I'm I'm sort of I I could believe that we're in a simulation. I think I'm not sure I fully buy it. Uh the other reason I don't fully buy it is that even though I think the structure like lends itself to it, there'd be a
[58:01] question of like why? Why are we like like who's who's running this and for what? And and that one I don't know about. >> Well, something Elon said has stuck with me about this that if you were to run a simulation, it'd be a really interesting it'd be like a my an interesting time in history and or something that you're really excited about. And if tracks that this is a very interesting time in history. >> Yes. [laughter] Yeah, okay, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. >> data centers in space and robots and artificial intelligence. >> Yeah, okay. I see it now. I see it now.
[58:33] Yeah, somebody like recently told me, you know, they used to think that may you live in interesting times was was like a a blessing. And they're not so sure now. They're like, "Ah, you know, the boring times are are like pretty good, too." >> Oh, man. And then there's a an Emmanuel out there watching your thinking process in your J space. >> Oh my god. Yeah, hopefully I'm making him proud. He's not like, "Oh, I got to rerun the simulation. We messed up this one." >> Shut it down. Oh, man. Okay. Uh one last question randomly out of nowhere. Uh so Swyx, who
[59:05] um runs AI engineering Latent Space podcast, awesome guy, you were asked him what to ask you. You were on his podcast a year ago, and uh something completely from a different direction. He wanted to get your take on Jev, which is this hot new model that recently came out that uh is very fast making decisions. Uh OpenAI, funny enough, just launched their own version like a week later. Uh thoughts on on Jev in the space of quick decision-based models? >> Yeah, right. So, my my take on Jev is this sort of, you know, the these kind
[59:35] of models you you you give them some context and you give them a few options to choose between and they just are very quick at at choosing an option for you. Uh, to me it's impossible not to hear about this and think of of sort of system one thinking versus system two or something, right? So, like a lot of what I've studied with these models is how they sample one token with the with like the cloud models. And so, you know, you can think of of of like these decision models are as pretty similar. So, like taking an element sample one token.
[60:05] They're they're different important ways, but like at a fundamental level you can be like, "Oh, it's you're not letting the model, you know, sample and like reason." It's just you're like, "Got got feeling, you know, is the answer A or is the answer B?" Um, to me that seems like like something that's like that general frame of like sometimes you'll just want a binary decision or like one out of 10 or whatever is just like clearly, I don't know, like like both clearly useful and something that I imagine is is like
[60:35] probably going to be a part of of like intelligent systems, right? Where you you have for some stuff you need to think about a long time, you know, it's like, "What what's our road map for the next year?" You need to think about for a while. And then for some stuff where it's like, you know, is this is this person who wrote us a review happy or upset? You kind of you're happy with the sort of gut judgment. Um, so yeah, I think I think this is I think this kind of research is is cool and I think it's also kind of different from the, you know, it's like it's it's like a bit of a novel take on on some of the LLMs we've seen. So, yeah, I'm pretty excited
[61:06] to see where where where this kind of stuff goes. >> So, what I'm hearing here is this kind of going to be a new foundational component most likely of of AI and LLMs. And the system one system two stuff is basically Kahneman's kind of I have that book up there actually behind me. This system one just to keep it simple is just like your kind of your amygdala-limbic system making just like gut level quick decisions like snake oh no. >> Yes. >> Uh where you don't have to think long about it and it's kind of the protective protect you from bad things really easily and quickly. And system two is where we really think about stuff and process.
[61:36] >> Yeah, exactly. >> Sweet. Emmanuel, is there anything else that we haven't covered? Anything else you want to say or mention? Anything you want to double down on before we get to our very exciting lightning round? >> I'm definitely curious for for uh folks' takes always on on some of the stuff that you know, uh is still unexplored or didn't make sense. There's a lot more interp experiments than we have the time to share, you know, models have a bunch of weird weird little things about them. Like
[62:06] maybe I'll do a lightning round of weird little things if that's okay. >> it. Absolutely. >> Okay. Weird little thing one, um we found that, you know, models can like actually answer questions obviously. They can do math or they can, you know, you can ask them like what's the color of a banana and they'll actually like, you know, if you look inside you'll see all these intermediate steps. But they have a separate mechanism which is kind of like a gut check. Uh and which is totally different and which is just like as they reason they'll have like some part of them that will flag like mm something's wrong. So if a model like somehow says,
[62:37] you know, 4 + 5 = 23 or something, uh there's a part of the model that just like reads that and doesn't do the math but it's just like that can't be right cuz like 4 + 5 definitely under 10. And so they learn these weird kind of like hunches. They they feel like kind of kind of like like a hunch. Um maybe another one is you can tell the model, "Hey, do this task and think about this other thing." And then you can use interp to see if like there's intermediate representations that map to the other thing.
[63:07] And that works. You sort of see that it does think about the other thing. This is something that's really mysterious to me because there's no kind of training reason why why the model would would would have to learn that. So, it's sort of like another one of these um weird behaviors. And actually, maybe I'll keep it at two. I think these two are are are good enough. >> Just what a fun What a fun job this is just studying this thing and trying to understand what the hell's going on. How was it getting this smart? How does it think? >> Yeah. >> Um How many Like how many people are even How many people are even in this space?
[63:37] Just like how large is this field? >> The field itself is is, you know, is getting pretty large. I would say maybe hundreds, not thousands. Uh there's, you know, uh different inter people at at the different labs. And then there's there's um in academia quite a few labs putting out great work. >> Is the best uh If someone were to get into the space, are they Is it like an ML person usually? Or is there like a neuroscientist sort of track to get into this? >> Yeah, there's actually a surprising amount of of, you know,
[64:07] ex-neuroscientists. Uh I do think in order to get in the field, you know, there's a there is actually it doesn't require a lot of prior knowledge because it's such a new field. So, it's actually, you know, the on-ramp is is is mostly, I would say, like self-studying and reading some of the some of the the key papers. And then there's actually you know, um yeah, maybe I should give a plug. There's actually like websites like interpedia.org, I think is the URL, which are sort of like open-source
[64:37] interp. Uh so, they have they like host, you know, a bunch of models and let you sort of do interp experiments on them. And so, you know, people have just been been doing that uh on their own. And I think that there's so much to explore uh that if if you're at all curious, you should just give it a try. >> That's awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes in case that's not the right URL. >> Cool. >> Well, Emmanuel, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? >> I am as ready as I'll ever be. >> Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
[65:07] >> One I read recently and is A Brief History of Intelligence. Uh it's this really cool book that walks through the history of like basically brains and five key moments in in our evolution that sort of bootstraps these brain systems on top of one another. It's super accessible like you don't need any neuroscience knowledge or anything. Uh another one is Story of Your Life and Others. This is Ted Chiang. This is maybe my favorite sci-fi book of all
[65:37] time. It's a bunch of short stories. It does what I think is the the like high art version of sci-fi where it's just take one weird idea like what if you know this happened and then write a story of just like what would the world look like if that happened. It's truly excellent. >> I think I have that on my bookshelf behind me, too. Um also highly recommend that one. Favorite recent movie or TV show? >> Okay. One popular one, one deep cut. Uh
[66:08] Obsession was my favorite movie of the year. Uh it's a horror movie so don't don't go if you don't if you hate horror movies but if >> you. >> Oh, no. Even if you're if you're not squeamish if you're open to a horror movie you should go cuz it's I it was just so fresh. You know how movies I feel like if you've seen a lot sometimes you're like oh, it's another I've seen this many times. This one was just so new, so fresh. And I'll say one thing about it which is that it takes a lot of rom-com tropes and like subverts them to said be spooky and I think that
[66:39] that's just a brilliant brilliant way to make a movie. And then I'm French so there's [snorts] a TV show that came out this year called Bref. The Bref is French for brief. Uh Bref used to be this cult classic in France to have like 15 years ago and they came up with came up with a sequel uh many many years into the making. And you can watch it. I had a bunch of American friends that have watched it. It's got subtitles and it's just this incredibly again it's like novel. Like the editing is crazy. Uh Um they are just extremely
[67:11] creative and it's very short. So, I would recommend that. >> Favorite product you recently discovered that you love? >> I I love my Apple Watch and I hate that it charges uh or I have to charge every day. So, I bought the Apple Watch Ultra uh just recently and man, that is so nice. If you've ever been frustrated I this good product that somehow we can't figure out how to give a good battery to. Well, it turns out if you make it bigger uh the battery's better. So, I've been happy with that. >> Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to often
[67:42] in work or in life? >> There's like one non-fiction book that really is like one of my favorite ever. It's 4,000 weeks. Um it has a lot in it that that I think is cool. Uh one of the cool things is a sort of thing that was really relevant to me, which is that like the when I finally mentality is a common mentality and it's kind of toxic. So, so what does that mean? It's sort of this like uh when I finally you know, check off this this all the items on my to-do list, I'll
[68:12] finally be able to chill. When I finally get like married, I'll be happy. When I finally get a promotion uh and then this is sort of you know, you were talking about meditation, right? This is like almost the opposite of meditation and that you know, at the end of the day, your life is like all of the moments you lived uh in the moment and that there's this sense that we actually should just like try to always like be you know, i- in the moment and not projecting yourself towards like a future that seems better. Like probably if you're telling yourself when I finally do X, I'll be happy. When you do X, you will not be happy.
[68:42] >> Is there a better phrase to use or is it just don't do that? Like what do I say? >> Uh I don't know. I think to me the the the the positive version is like be in the moment, right? It's just like just I appreciate the appreciate the moment. >> There was a blog post recently I read that was Oh, I forget. It was something like like enjoy the sandwich. I think is I think it's literally the sense. I don't know if you saw this. Or it was like someone who was like, "Yeah, but just you're eating a sandwich. You know, you've eaten many sandwiches. Like enjoy the sandwich. You're in You're in like a a team meeting, you know, yeah, you've been in my like like I'm enjoying like be be in it and and sort of not looking
[69:12] looking towards the next thing. >> I did a meditation retreat once. It was a 10-day silent retreat where you eat silently too and no one's talking. You just sit there and eat your food. And I just remember peeling an egg for like 5 minutes and just noticing every every shell piece and just the smell of it all and and it like it was it's like hard to get into that mode, but it's such an interesting place to be where everything is just interesting. Like wow, like this egg versus just like stuff through my mouth. >> Yeah, right. While you're like on Slack with your left hand and like listening
[69:42] to a podcast at the same time. >> [laughter] >> Oh, man. Okay, final question. You study AI all day. You're watching AI how things if if an AI were to look inside your brain, what would what would be surprising? What would it see that might surprise people? >> I mean, surely my deepest darkest secrets. But what are there? >> it. Let's get into it. >> [laughter] >> Oh, man. Uh I've always been like a bit of a a jokester. Uh or or it is just that's just how I like both how I live and how
[70:12] I cope. I just like think that even in serious situations, you should you should aim to kind of have some levity. And so I think if if you looked inside my brain, you'd definitely be surprised uh that like basically at any given moment, I'm just like focusing on some random thing that is funny. You know, I'll be in a in a serious meeting and I'll be like, "Oh, yeah, but you know, like isn't it kind of random that you're like whatever like wearing this random thing?" Or something. It's just like I have these intrusive thoughts that I that I keep out but that are all usually like just bad jokes. And sometimes as you've heard
[70:43] today, unfortunately, they come out. So, I'm sorry for those. But that's that's probably the most surprising thing. >> I love that. Manuel, thank you so much for being here. Uh final question, how can listeners be useful to you? >> Just do some inter read some read read about how the models work. I mean, you mentioned like workers write up. I think it was it was great as well. I think I think you know, it's just this is such a new field like what interp and like AI and LLM's and I think it it just benefits from from people engaging and and um being informed. So, like read things if
[71:14] there's if there's more that you would want to know about how these models work that we haven't figured out, you can you know, reach out to me. I'm on variety of social social platforms. Like probably you can reach out to me on X. >> And we'll link to some of the videos that you guys have put out that describe a lot of the stuff we've been talking about like J space and things like that. There's some really beautiful videos your team has made. I don't know who does that, but they're really cool. >> Yeah, this is we partner with our our design team. So, all credit goes to them for that for the cool videos. >> Amazing. All right. Well, thank you again Emmanuel. Thank you so much for
[71:44] joining this. This was amazing. >> Thanks Lenny. Yeah, this was super fun. >> Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.