Frontier Tower AI Paper Reading Club - Week 24 - A Global Workspace in Language Models

​Weekly paper: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

​Intro: If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.

​In this paper, we present evidence that an analogous functional distinction has emerged in modern AI models. Specifically, we observe that language models maintain a privileged set of internal representations, available for report, modulation, and flexible internal reasoning, atop a much larger volume of automatic processing. We identify these representations using a new interpretability technique, which surfaces the concepts a model is poised to verbalize at any point in its processing. Measuring and intervening on these representations provides us a window into a model’s thought processes, uncovering internal reasoning and reactions that do not appear in its output.

​What are the group goals? Stay on top of AI research, improve understanding of AI fundamentals+math.

​Who is welcome? Everyone! Try to put in at least some time on the paper and come prepared with questions or things you'd like to discuss, but it's ok to just show up.

​How will it work? Ideally everyone shows up and has at least made one solid pass through the paper, and then we can spend 30-60 minutes as a group going over it.

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​This event is sponsored by learning layer labs. https://learninglayer.ai

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​This event is hosted at the Frontier Tower:

​We are transforming a 16-floor tower in San Francisco into a self-governed vertical village—a hub for frontier technologies and creative arts. Tier-one labs presenting AI, Ethereum, biotech, neuroscience, longevity, robotics, makerspace, human flourishing, and arts & music. These floors will house innovators and creators pushing the boundaries of human potential in a post-AI-singularity world.

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