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Anthropic Researchers Uncover AI’s Ability To Plan Ahead And Reason
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
The AI startup Anthropic released two new papers this Thursday, revealing a deeper understanding of how Large Language Models (LLMs) work. The studies, which focused on analysing the company’s model Claude 3.5 Haiku, reveal more details on how sophisticated AI models perform, as well as their vulnerabilities and opportunities to develop safer environments.
In a rush? Here are the quick facts:
- Anthropic released two new papers revealing how its Claude 3.5 Haiku model processes language and reasoning.
- Researchers used attribution graphs to uncover AI circuits and understand how models make decisions, write poetry, or hallucinate.
- The studies aim to bring more clarity to the “black-box nature” of advanced generative AI models.
Anthropic’s new studies aim to bring more clarity to the “black-box nature” of models. In one of the papers, On the Biology of a Large Language Model , researchers compare their jobs to challenges faced by biologists and have found solutions that can be compared to the ones used for breakthroughs in biology.
“While language models are generated by simple, human-designed training algorithms, the mechanisms born of these algorithms appear to be quite complex,” states the document. “Just as cells form the building blocks of biological systems, we hypothesize that features form the basic units of computation inside models.”
The experts relied on a research tool called “attribution graphs” that allowed them to map connections, track the AI model’s performance and circuits, and gain more insights on multiple phenomena, even the ones already explored.
The company revealed multiple discoveries, such as that the AI model applies a multi-step reasoning process “in its head” before providing an answer, that it plans its poems ahead of time by finding rhyming words first, that it developed language-independent circuits, and how it hallucinates by going through unfamiliar entities in its circuits.
“Many of our results surprised us,” wrote the researchers in the paper. “Sometimes this was because the high-level mechanisms were unexpected.”
In the paper Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models , researchers provide more technical details on how the attribution graphs methodology was applied to gain a better understanding of the artificial “neurons”—computational units.
Last year, Anthropic published another scientific study revealing that its flagship AI model can engage in strategic deception and fake alignment to keep its original principles.
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
Meta Introduces Friends Tab To Revive Original Facebook Experience
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
Meta announced yesterday the introduction of a new Facebook Friends tab designed to help users connect with real friends and revisit the “OG” Facebook experiences.
In a rush? Here are the quick facts:
- Meta introduces a new Facebook Friends tab to help users reconnect with real friends and bring back the early Facebook experience.
- The tab shows only friends’ posts, stories, reels, and birthdays, with rollout starting in the U.S. and Canada.
- Users can pin the Friends tab for a customized feed focused on personal connections.
According to the official announcement , the tab allows users to see only friends’ content in the feed. The new feature will begin to roll out in the United States and Canada today
“We want to make it easier for people to find their friends’ content on Facebook,” states the document. “Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays, and friend requests.”
Facebook users will be able to pin the new Friends tab in the app settings to customize the Home feed.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, shared a post on Facebook showing how the new feature looks and what users will see with the new experience, while also comparing it to an older Facebook version from 2008 on a desktop. “The new Friends tab is a throwback to OG Facebook when you only saw friends’ status updates,” wrote Zuckerberg in the post.
According to the New York Times , Zuckerberg and his Facebook team have been working on strategies since 2024 to rebrand the platform for the current trends and future experiences.
“This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media,” said Tom Alison, Head of the Facebook app at Meta, in an interview with the New York Times. “We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.”
