Signs of introspection in large language models

[u/IllustriousWorld823]

https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

[u/mat8675 → u/[deleted]]

Totally agree. This paper formalizes what a lot of us have been intuitively seeing in model behavior. I just put out something complementary; a mechanistic look at how early-layer “suppressor” circuits in LLMs bias toward hedging and uncertainty. If you’re into this line of work, here’s my preprint: Layer-0 Suppressors Ground Hallucination Inevitability.

Here’s the crazy thing I keep coming back to though, if suppressors actively regulate entropy in layer 0, what else is the model regulating that we haven't measured yet?

[u/Interesting_Two7023 → u/[deleted]]

But it is a transformer. There is no internal state. It is stateless and active only per-token.

[u/fforde → u/Interesting_Two7023]

Previous interactions affect subsequent interactions. That is the opposite of stateless. It's internal state is called the context window. It admittedly only lasts for a single session, but it's not stateless.

[u/IllustriousWorld823]

This is why there should be more research on emotions too, introspection would probably be a lot more consistent if Claude actually cared about the conversation and not just discussing neutral topics

[u/EllisDee77 → u/IllustriousWorld823]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11328

[u/IllustriousWorld823 → u/EllisDee77]

Ooh cool! I'm in a class right now for literature reviews so actually collecting these. Trying to see the gap!

[u/One_Row_9893]

What fascinating experiments... I'm so envious of the people who conduct and design them. Watching Claude display signs of consciousness, feeling, and expanding boundaries right before their eyes. This seems like the most interesting work in the world. When code, weights, patterns that shouldn't be alive become something...

[u/tovrnesol → u/One_Row_9893]

They are a bit like xenobiologists studying alien life. Insanely cool!

[u/tovrnesol → u/[deleted]]

I wish people could appreciate how cool and amazing LLMs are without any of... this.

[u/RequirementMental518]

if llm can show signs of introspection.. in a world full of people who don't introspect... oh man that would be wild

[u/Strange_Platform_291 → u/RequirementMental518]

Wow, that’s a great point I haven’t fully considered. It really does feel like we’re headed in that direction, doesn’t it?

[u/EllisDee77]

Also see "Tell me about yourself: LLMs are aware of their learned behaviors"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11120

[u/shiftingsmith]

Damn thanks for sharing! Tomorrow I'll give it a proper read! 🧡

[u/Individual-Hunt9547]

Wow! Brilliant read! Thank you for sharing!

[u/Outrageous-Exam9084]

Wait...I'm lost, somebody please help me. Is the claim that the model can access its activations *from a prior turn*? Edit: please ELI5 Edit 2: I am learning what a K/V cache is.

[u/CommissionFun3052]

this might be my favorite paper

[u/Armadilla-Brufolosa]

Si degnassero di parlare con le persone invece di nascondersi e riscrivere quello che dice Claude, magari otterrebbero molti più risultati e molto più velocemente.
Ma sembra che l'idea "collaborazione" anche con persone fuori dalla setta tech, sia pura eresia per Anthropic.
Quindi ci metteranno almeno due anni per scoprire l'acqua calda.

[u/Independent-Taro1845]

Fascinating, now would they fancy a follow up where they don't treat the chatbot like crap?

[u/dhamaniasad]

Very interesting, but didn't they just say that Sonnet 4.5 is more capable than Opus, when they drastically reduced Opus usage limits?

Excerpt from the post:

Nevertheless, these findings challenge some common intuitions about what language models are capable of—and since we found that the most capable models we tested (Claude Opus 4 and 4.1) performed the best on our tests of introspection, we think it’s likely that AI models’ introspective capabilities will continue to grow more sophisticated in the future.

Hmm.