Anthropic’s Breakthrough: Understanding Frontier AI

A Great Leap In Understanding LLMs

Ignacio de Gregorio
11 min readJun 5, 2024
Generated by author using GPT-4o

This week, Anthropic has published the biggest leap in frontier AI model understanding we have ever seen.

With frontier AI models, we run into a weird conundrum: we know they work, but we don’t know why, and worse, we don’t know how they think.

However, over the last few years, an AI field known as Mechanistic Interpretability has grown heavily in interest and has a clear goal: demystifying the models that could, one day, give us AGI… before it’s too late.

Now, Anthropic, OpenAI’s main rival, has released a beautiful and probably seminal piece of research that gives us new ways of understanding Large Language Models (LLMs) and sheds light on how we could soon steer behavior to prevent unsafe practices.

Sadly, however, as with anything in tech, this discovery has a scary trade-off: increasing the likelihood that our society becomes ‘censor-first’ and ‘single-minded.’

You are probably sick of AI newsletters talking about how this or that **just** happened. These newsletters abound because coarsely talking about events and things that already took place is easy, but the value provided is limited, and the hype exaggerated.

However, newsletters talking…

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