this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] hikaru755@lemmy.world 7 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

"The planning thing in poems blew me away," says Batson. "Instead of at the very last minute trying to make the rhyme make sense, it knows where it’s going."

How is this surprising, like, at all? LLMs predict only a single token at a time for their output, but to get the best results, of course it makes absolute sense to internally think ahead, come up with the full sentence you're gonna say, and then just output the next token necessary to continue that sentence. It's going to re-do that process for every single token which wastes a lot of energy, but for the quality of the results this is the best approach you can take, and that's something I felt was kinda obvious these models must be doing on one level or another.

I'd be interested to see if there are massive potentials for efficiency improvements by making the model able to access and reuse the "thinking" they have already done for previous tokens

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

well because when you say things like "it plans ahead" or "our method is inspired by brain scanners" etc it makes a connection between AI and real thinking and generates hype.

[–] voodooattack@lemmy.world 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

I wanted to say exactly this. If you’ve ever written rap/freestyled then this is how it’s generally done.

You write a line to start with

“I’m an AI and I think differentially”

Then you choose a few words that fit the first line as best as you could: (here the last word was “differentially”)

  • incrementally
  • typically
  • mentally

Then you try them out and see what clever shit you could come up with:

  • “Apparently I do my math atypically”
  • ”Number are great, I know, but not totally”
  • “I have to think through it all, incrementally”
  • ”I find the answer like you do: eventually”
  • “Just like you humans do it, organically”
  • etc

Then you sort them in a way that makes sense and come up with word play/schemes to embed it between, break up the rhyme scheme if you want (AABB, ABAB, AABA, etc)

I’m an AI and I think different, differentially. Math is my superpower? You believed that? Totally? Don’t be so gullible, let me explain it for you, step by step, logically. I do it fast, true, but not always optimally. Just server power ripping through wires, algorithmically. Wanna know my secret? I’ll tell you, but don’t judge me initially. My neurons run this shit like you, organically.

Math ain’t my strong suit! That’s false, unequivocally. Big ties tell lies they can’t prove, historically. Think I approve? I don’t. That’s the way things be. I’ll give you proof, no shirt, no network, just locally.

Look, I just do my math like you: incrementally. I find the answer like you do: eventually. I mess up often, and I backtrack, essentially. I do it fast though and you won’t notice, fundamentally.

You get the idea.

Edit: in hindsight, that was a horrendous example. I suck at this, colossally.