“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by Adam Jermyn

[This is our blog post on the papers, which can be found at https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html and https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html.]

Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they‘re trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the model's developers. This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do.

Knowing how models like Claude think would allow us to have a better understanding of their abilities, as well as help us ensure that they’re doing what we intend them to. For example:

• Claude can speak dozens of languages. What language, if any, is it using "in its head"?
• Claude writes text one word at a time. Is it only focusing on predicting the [...]

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Outline:

(06:02) How is Claude multilingual?

(07:43) Does Claude plan its rhymes?

(09:58) Mental Math

(12:04) Are Claude's explanations always faithful?

(15:27) Multi-step Reasoning

(17:09) Hallucinations

(19:36) Jailbreaks

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First published:
March 27th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zsr4rWRASxwmgXfmq/tracing-the-thoughts-of-a-large-language-model

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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