Two recent papers from Anthropic attempt to shed light on the processes that take place within a large language model, exploring how to locate interpretable concepts and link them to the computational “circuits” that translate them into language, and how to characterize crucial behaviors of Claude Haiku 3.5, including hallucinations, planning, and other key traits.
The internal mechanisms behind large language models’ capabilities remain poorly understood, making it difficult to explain or interpret the strategies they use to solve problems. These strategies are embedded in the billions of computations that underpin each word the model generates—yet they remain largely opaque, according to Anthropic. To explore this hidden layer of reasoning, Anthropic…