Ameisen: LLMs plan future tokens rather than operating purely myopically
Emmanuel Ameisen · The Utility of Interpretability — Emmanuel Amiesen · Jun 6, 2025 · at 1:13:16
Anthropic research scientist Emmanuel Ameisen discusses mechanistic interpretability findings on whether large language models maintain forward-looking internal planning states.
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“Language models are next token predictors is like a fact. Like that is what they do. They are trained to predict the next token. However, that does not mean that they myopically only consider the next token When they choose the next token, you can work on break the next token, but still like doing so in a way that helps, helps you predict the token, like 10 tokens in the future. And I think, well, now we definitely know that they're not my ability to predict in the next token.”
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