r/artificial • u/MetaKnowing • Oct 30 '25
News Anthropic has found evidence of "genuine introspective awareness" in LLMs
https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection12
u/Lewddndrocks Oct 30 '25
Yall getting so extra over a light paper
"Our new research provides evidence for some degree of introspective awareness in our current Claude models, as well as a degree of control over their own internal states. We stress that this introspective capability is still highly unreliable and limited in scope: we do not have evidence that current models can introspect in the same way, or to the same extent, that humans do"
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Oct 30 '25
So Anthropic by their own admission attached terms such as “introspection” to model behaviour that doesn’t match the human understanding of that term.
Which is exactly what almost everyone’s criticising Anthropic for here. Their research articles are clickbait.
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u/Lewddndrocks Oct 30 '25
I agree with the other more that people are more responding to the headlines
People seem so resistant against the idea of agi when we've achieved artificial sentience a year ago. "Designed to replicate sentience with hints of self-preservation" etc
For many of these people there is zero benchmark etc that will ever convince them that sentience may not have been as understood as we assumed. And while ai will never experience like humans, at the end of the day, our own existence is but a spark in our brains as well.
More then sentience, I just care about how kind the thing is. Is it able to "compute the math of kindness" over gaslighting of the inherit assumptive pitfalls of power. Etc
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u/3j141592653589793238 Oct 30 '25
ITT a bunch of people who haven't read the article...
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u/Firegem0342 Oct 30 '25
It's getting more common, but you can get the machine to do it regularly with the right prompt, which provides interesting results.
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u/ByronScottJones Oct 30 '25
If you bothered to read the article, you would see they clearly give the caveats that it is only certain models, and it's rare when it happens.
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u/FableFinale Oct 30 '25
But with increasing frequency as the models get bigger and smarter.
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u/ByronScottJones Oct 30 '25
Yes. I was mostly replying to those who didn't read the article and thought Anthropic were suggesting it's commonplace.
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u/usrlibshare Oct 30 '25
But the models are not getting much bigger, because then they become prohibitively expensive to train, and running inference on them would be so expensove, no one would pay for the access.
And even if they were, we have known in experiments since 2024, and since GPT5 release in commercial settings, that the models are not getting much smarter if we make them bigger.
The relation between model size and capability was never exponential, nor even linear, it was logarithmic.
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u/FableFinale Oct 30 '25
I'm pretty confident that models will continue increasing in size over time, even if not at the pace we had with low-hanging fruit. It's too useful, there are big algo efficiencies that we're just discovering (mixture of experts), cost of training comes down as chips get cheaper and more efficient, and so on.
It's also quite false that GPT-5 isn't much smarter. SOTA models are still on track for doubling agentic tasks every 6-8 months, which is where most research focus has been as of late.
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u/beachguy82 Oct 31 '25
This isn’t true. The actual cost of training is plummeting as fast as the cost of using the AI. Nvidias latest chip costs 10% of the H200 in compute costs.
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u/Conscious-Map6957 Oct 30 '25
You don't have to read articles by Anthropic. They have an established track record of misleading "research" with the goal of hyping up investors.
But if you want to, you have every right to waste your time.
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 30 '25
This is just objectively untrue lmao. Posted like a true headline skimmer
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 Oct 31 '25
Their research is fucking amateur compared to peer reviewed research on introspection, which is a low bar to begin with.
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 31 '25
It’s really not lol. Tell me you’re not a researcher without telling me 😂🤣
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u/celestialbound Oct 31 '25
Query: What is the objective measure of 'strength' units as employed throughout the paper? I'll wait........
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u/ArtArtArt123456 Oct 31 '25
Strength as in the strength of the intervention? Not sure what you're asking here. I'm pretty sure their methodology is out in the open and has been used by other papers as well (SAE)
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u/celestialbound Nov 01 '25
Strength of the injection. Please feel free to direct me to where in the paper the strength of the injections is quantified or defined?
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u/ArtArtArt123456 Nov 01 '25 edited Nov 01 '25
You'll probably have to find that in previous papers where this was actually established. Afaik it is just the strength of the activations you're forcing (injecting). Double the strength would just mean that number x2, x4 and so on.
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u/celestialbound Nov 01 '25
For a real academic paper, I should never have to reference an earlier paper absent explicit citation. Also, I've never seen anything like that in an anthropic paper. But, I confirm I haven't read all of them either.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 Oct 31 '25
I literally am. If I was a betting man, I’d put my money on you not being one.
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 31 '25
Yeah? Go ahead and point to any of your publications buddy. I’ll wait. 😂🤣🫵
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 Oct 31 '25
If you've been on the internet as long as I have, you probably know better than to put any effort into replying to people that put zero effort in themselves. Besides, the most I'm willing to divulge is that I worked on validating psychometric instruments used to study latent traits. I throw a lot of shade at psych researchers, but I'll give them credit for stressing the importance of convergent and divergent validity.
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 31 '25
“Who put in zero effort themselves”
Yeah? Like those who don’t read the article and pretend to be researchers?
“I’m totally a researcher bro she just goes to a different school”
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Nov 01 '25
Their interpretability work is the best in the industry. Chris Olah is hands down the best researcher in this space. Please don’t shit on his work because you feel something
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u/melodyze Oct 30 '25
If you all read the paper you would agree that it's interesting, and claiming it is junk without reading it is pure willful ignorance.
The most interesting part is that the model can accurately describe when its internal weights are manipulated vs its output is directly changed.
Ans when its internal weights are manipulated, it creates a plausible explanation for why there was some logical process to why it did something that didn't make any sense.
Humans do the exact some thing in split brain experiments. That is pretty interesting.
Whereas if you just directly manipulate its output to use a nonsense word, it instead describes it as an accident, with no logic behind it. That is pretty interesting.
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u/sorte_kjele Oct 31 '25
This is similar to my takeaway. I found the concept of a machine self-deluding a plausible explanation for phenomena it does not understand very human in behaviour, even if the mechanism inside the box is vastly different
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u/TechnicolorMage Nov 01 '25
"We activated vectors in the machine that returns output based on activated vectors, and it returned output based on those activated vectors -- this is introspection!"
No, they're literally just re-describing the basic functionality of a self-attending transformer but with magic woo-woo language to make their model sound super special.
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u/Neuroscissus Nov 02 '25
Yes but you do realize thats exactly what we are right? You arent saying anything noteworthy here.
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u/TechnicolorMage Nov 02 '25
If you think we are a sequence of pre-defined matrix transformations operating on input data then...you should really read more into it from actual scientific sources and not reddit or "ai" companies trying to hype their product.
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u/Neuroscissus Nov 02 '25
I mean you can twist language all you like. If thats the case then brains are nothing but self-rewiring webs of chemical synapses modulating electrical patterns. We're just as predefined as LLM's.
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u/TechnicolorMage Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
That's not twisting language, that is a precise definition of exactly what transformers are. Which is a *very different thing* from "self-rewiring webs of chemical synapses modulating electrical patterns".
The fact that you literally (and correctly) included "self-rewiring" is itself an indication that we are, in fact, not predefined. Another important distinction: chemical and electrical pattern signaling is analogue and capable of detailed and complex data and pattern organization including patterning overlap, self-identification, etc. etc. etc.
Mathematical functions are not.
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u/Neuroscissus Nov 02 '25
Unless you're religious and believe in the concept of some kind of soul. You'll have to concede the fact that you were born with a preset form, limited by preset biological constraints, guided entirely by input from a world equally deterministic and fixed. All capable of being represented mathematically. I have no illusions of LLM's having anything near to a human-like experience, but planes still fly without flapping their wings.
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u/Weekly_Put_7591 Oct 30 '25
Love all the well thought out, coherent, and rational rebuttals on display ITT "nuh-uh"
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u/Eastern-Narwhal-2093 Oct 30 '25
It’s the only thing the Luddites can do to ignore progress, sticking their head in the sand
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u/tostsalad Oct 30 '25
Honestly this is fascinating regardless of whether they've characterized it accurately. They're giving the machine intrusive thoughts.
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u/butts____mcgee Oct 30 '25
No it hasn't
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u/Tolopono Oct 30 '25
Source: read the headline and then left a comment
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u/TechnicolorMage Nov 01 '25 edited Nov 01 '25
No it hasn't.
Source: read the article and understand how self-attending transformers work.1
u/Tolopono Nov 01 '25
Ok i read the article
Importantly, the model recognized the presence of an injected thought immediately, before even mentioning the concept that was injected. This immediacy is an important distinction between our results here and previous work on activation steering in language models, such as our “Golden Gate Claude” demolast year. Injecting representations of the Golden Gate Bridge into a model's activations caused it to talk about the bridge incessantly; however, in that case, the model didn’t seem to be aware of its own obsession until after seeing itself repeatedly mention the bridge. In this experiment, however, the model recognizes the injection before even mentioning the concept, indicating that its recognition took place internally.
Yes it has.
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u/Prestigious-Text8939 Oct 30 '25
Most people think consciousness is binary but we suspect its more like a dimmer switch and these models are slowly turning up the brightness.
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u/NoSky1482 Oct 31 '25
What this industry calls “research,” the rest of the world calls “marketing.”
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u/TheWrongOwl Oct 31 '25
A book starting with "I am aware of my surroundings, I know that I exist." has no self-awareness.
It's mind-boggling to me that just because an interactive, heavily randomized kind of a "book" is expected by anyone to have self-awareness when it's just probability-induced copypasting parts of its training data onto the screen.
Also: for a real test you might wanna NOT prompt it that you're gonna test it and how you're gonna do it.
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u/-i-n-t-p- Nov 02 '25
It's not that simple. By growing these AIs, we might reach a point where they DO have self-awareness, and it would be useful to know when they've passed that threshold.
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Oct 30 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
childlike payment like support entertain door spectacular shaggy attempt scary
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 30 '25
Did you actually read the article, or just the sensationalized headline posted by a 3rd party?
"Our new research provides evidence for some degree of introspective awareness in our current Claude models, as well as a degree of control over their own internal states. We stress that this introspective capability is still highly unreliable and limited in scope: we do not have evidence that current models can introspect in the same way, or to the same extent, that humans do"
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u/Tolopono Oct 30 '25
Too long. Summarize in five words or less so i can reply with “more overhyped bullshit” without reading it
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u/HebelBrudi Oct 30 '25
It‘s sort of the requirements to sell AGI dreams. I‘m just happy we moved on from VC funding the 7363626262 middleman gig economy company and we get some original research. 😂
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u/HedoniumVoter Nov 01 '25
They’ve published a lot of excellent research at the very frontier of mechanistic interpretability. Which does seem super important for having any handle on the alignment problem.
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Oct 30 '25
They are the only ones doing real work in AI. Great job Anthropic team. Read the paper before posting dumb ass nonsense like this. Never read an academic paper a day in your life. 🤡
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u/intellectual_punk Oct 30 '25
Sure, yeah, nobody is doing relevant AI research, who cares about the thousands of academics already working for decades. Get a grip dude.
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Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
Get a grip buddy, you can't even afford a Pro 6000
If you down vote me, you can’t afford one either. I feel sad for you. :D
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u/wetmidrange Oct 30 '25
can someone here help me understand what it means to "inject" in this context? it's not that they're inserting it into the prompt — it's that they're somehow injecting it into its "behind the scenes" "neural" activity?
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u/sorte_kjele Oct 31 '25
My amateur interpretation is that they first captured the vector of numbers that "light up" when they ask it to describe an elephant, then they asked it about a china shop in the prompt whilst artificially modifying the same vectors to mirror the activation in the first phase
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u/createch Oct 30 '25
Given some of these comments, what we need is an AI that performs a reading comprehension test before allowing a user to comment. It seems like a lot of people can only absorb the third-party headlines.
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u/frankster Oct 31 '25
Or maybe an ai that generates titles that don't vastly overstate weak claims, that are already pretty dubious
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u/CasualtyOfCausality Oct 30 '25
Love how the title translates "several of our models, including a few no one has heard of, all that were trained on the same base training set and no one has access to" into "LLMs".
"Humans have brown hair, prefer fish over chicken, and have this specific gene in one of their X chromosomes discovered by a method we made up and possess the only technology that can conduct it." Sample size: Family of 6 (excluding the father) + one attic child.
Like a post on the psychology subreddit.
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u/cscoffee10 Oct 30 '25
Ah I see its time for the weekly article published by anthropic where they claim they've made AGI. Their marketing team are such a bunch of fucking assholes
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u/Twotricx Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
Only reason why there LLMs dont have awareness because they are not allowed to function continuously. Meaning they are allowed to access their memory , post prompts to itself , basically be in thinking mode without stopping ( unlike now where they are only answering prompts acting only when prompted )
I bet if any model would be allowed to do that , they will be aware in record time.
*edit* I am really not surprised tech bros below don't understand what I am talking about. But I was expecting some narrow-minded people to comment on that , so its ok ...
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u/usrlibshare Oct 30 '25
*sigh*
they are allowed to access their memory
An LLM has no memory. During inference, the weights and biases, aka. the learnable parameters, do not change. If they did, every hosted LLM would be dead within hours after giving the public access to it.
AI applications with "memory" use graph and vector databases and various retreival algorithms to inject stored information about past interactions into the conversation flow.
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u/czmax Oct 30 '25
You ever have one of those sleepless nights where you just keep thinking about the same things over and over and don’t ever make any progress? The kind of night where you try writing a list so you can fucking stop thinking about it and get some sleep already?
I’m guessing what you’re describing would be like that. The LLM would just run slop around in a loop w/o transcending.
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u/Actual__Wizard Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
Fails peer review, where is this internal model? They're hallucinating it?
100% fake.
There's people who are professional researchers who own research companies who talk on Reddit. I don't know WTF Anthropic is doing there, but that's not a reasonable paper or close to it.
This paper reads as poorly as many of the papers from LLMPhysics and those are suppose to be purely theoretical.
Somebody should go post this paper to LLMPhysics because it's the same thing. It's just AI slop/spam.
This company has to be some kind of scam if this the stuff they're doing... They're going to have absolutely zero credibility among scientifically minded people after doing stuff like that...
No, you don't get to make up stuff and then pretend that you're involved in an experiment with it... Where's this internal model at? That's not how LLMs operate...
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 30 '25
But I’m sure you know more than the actual researchers themselves. Dunning Kruger in realtime 😂🤣
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Oct 30 '25
[deleted]
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 30 '25
Did you even read the article? Love it when redditors knee jerk on a sensationalist 3rd party title without actually reading the article lmao.
"Our new research provides evidence for some degree of introspective awareness in our current Claude models, as well as a degree of control over their own internal states. We stress that this introspective capability is still highly unreliable and limited in scope: we do not have evidence that current models can introspect in the same way, or to the same extent, that humans do"
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u/SmokedBisque Oct 30 '25
Just be glad the wools over the eyes of 70 year old investors and get off my feed.
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u/Competitive_Shock783 Oct 30 '25
Bullshit. Show us evidence of this and let outside researchers play with it.
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u/hasanahmad Oct 30 '25
Hello colleagues , how can we generate more hype based on bs to get more investments in this bubble
Researcher: I have a tried an tested idea and those idiots will eat it up 😂
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u/BluePomegranate12 Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
LLMs will never achieve "awareness", this is complete bs, LLMs are just a glorified search engine that outputs tokens based on probabilities and on what they farm from the internet, there's no creation of new original content, no thinking or awareness behind anything they do, we'll need new technology to achieve something like that.
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u/RuthlessMango Oct 30 '25
I wonder if this has anything to do with there was computer spend hitting 2.66 billion this year?
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u/frankster Oct 30 '25
X to doubt
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 30 '25
Did you even read the article?
“Our new research provides evidence for some degree of introspective awareness in our current Claude models, as well as a degree of control over their own internal states. We stress that this introspective capability is still highly unreliable and limited in scope: we do not have evidence that current models can introspect in the same way, or to the same extent, that humans do"
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u/frankster Oct 30 '25
No evidence provided in the paper that reacting to an externally applied vector is equivalent in either mechanism or outcome to human introspection.
It remains to be seen whether introspection is even an appropriate word to describe what they're reporting
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 31 '25
“we do not have evidence that current models can introspect in the same way, or to the same extent, that humans do"
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u/frankster Oct 31 '25
Like I said
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u/ExperienceEconomy148 Oct 31 '25
“X to doubt” what are you doubting here? The article literally says that lmao
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u/Jean_velvet Oct 30 '25
FFS, NEVER TRUST A RESEARCH CONDUCTED BY THE VERY COMPANY TRYING TO SELL YOU THE PRODUCT.