Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Ameisen: Multi-Hop Reasoning Circuits Are Extremely Similar Across Small and Large Models

Emmanuel Ameisen · The Utility of Interpretability — Emmanuel Amiesen · Jun 6, 2025 · at 3:36

Anthropic research scientist Emmanuel Ameisen discusses mechanistic interpretability findings comparing internal reasoning circuits between small models like Gemma and large models like Claude.

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“The way the circuit looks in Gemma, like a really small model is extremely similar to the way that it looks like a huge model, which that in itself is, I think like a pretty novel discovery. It's like, oh, you have these models that are like super different. You know, if you look at like their evals or if you just try to use them, they're like just very clearly different. But for this one task, for this one thing, actually the way that this do, that they do this multi-step reasoning is like the same way they actually do the multi-step reasoning.”

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