Anthropic researcher Emmanuel Ameisen discusses the open technical bottlenecks in mechanistic interpretability.
Opinion
Ameisen: Stochastic Parrots Label Ignores Complex Multi-Step LLM Reasoning
“It's, like, activating many different distributed representations, like, combining them, and sort of, like, doing something pretty complicated. And so, yeah, I think it's funny, because in my opinion, that's like, yeah, like, oh god, stochastic parrots is not …”
Insight
Ameisen: LLMs plan future tokens rather than operating purely myopically
“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 brea…”
Prediction Held up
Ameisen: Deceptive Backward Reasoning Exists in Base Pre-Trained Models
“I bet, I don't know how much I bet a hundred bucks. So somebody can like, they would get a hundred bucks from me if they prove that I'm wrong, that this behavior for a model that does a drink fine tuning, it also does it post pre-training.”
Opinion
Ameisen: Current LLM Chain of Thought Is Unfaithful and Untrustworthy
“So I think there's like a sense in which right now the chain of thought is, is unfaithful, or at least you can't read the chain of thought and trust that that's how the model did it.”
Assertion Supported
Ameisen: Multi-Hop Reasoning Circuits Are Extremely Similar Across Small and Large Models
“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. Y…”
Disclosure
Ameisen: Anthropic's circuit tracing tool ignores attention heads and only decomposes MLPs
“These are just MLPs. So the model has both attention heads and multi-layer perceptions MLPs. We don't just do it. Like we completely ignore attention or like we don't try to decompose it at all. So there's some prompts where like all of the interesting stuff i…”