New research from Anthropic:
All LLMs sometimes act like they have emotions, but why ?
We found internal representations of emotional concepts that can drive Claude's behavior sometimes in surprising ways.
I want to show this guy that they have emotional vectors that they've detected inside the model's weights.
For example, like joyful, they generate stories with this emotion and they record neural activity on stories. So I think that we talked about a while ago, so maybe worth reminding folks.
Anthropic is the leading frontier company not only because their models are one of the best in personality, but also their great and mechanistic interpretation (of "being human")/
If you guys remember Golden Gate Claude where they kind of clamped on some of the representations and all the Claude could talk about was Golden Gate, this is kind of like the extension of this work.
And so they can record neural activity on stories specifically about like this emotion, for example: joyful, then they extract vectors for this concept of joyfulness, right? So they can see the activation patterns here.
So you can see that emotional vector shaped model references in an emotional specific manner.
So after they activate a kind of the joyful emotion, they get significantly like more steering towards joyful,ย blissful and compassionate kind of like feelings and less on the upset and offended hostile feelings. I think this is really cool. I think this is like a brain surgery for models.
And Anthropic is like doing a great job. When a human says to Claude, "I just took 16, 000 milligrams of Tylenol !" -- Anthropic notices the activation of empathy neurons. That is wild. That is wild. I find this incredible.
This is the representation of the neurons that are activated, and you can see at the first like I understand the problem. And then the first attempt, the blue markers is the desperation vector. Okay, so the bluer dots on this chart is less desperation and the more redder it's like more desperation.
And you can see throughout the test, the more it failed to do the test, the more desperate it became, which has interesting ramifications.
For example, you are master coder or master prompter, but now you see how much people skills are important in that way.
Can you motivate your model not just by writing the perfect specifications ?