I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

In an admittedly extremely rudimentary way, I am very interested in learning about artificial intelligence. On my 24 for 24 list, I included the item, Keep Learning and Experimenting

with AI.

As part of that effort, I listened to the Hard Fork Podcast, a podcast I love, where they often discuss issues related to AI.

On their May 31st, 2024, episode 85, the two hosts discussed recent strides made in understanding how large

language models work. This has been a quite mysterious issue. The hosts were

interviewing guests Josh Batson, a research scientist at Anthropic, an AI company,

and they were talking about Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic, and I often use Claude

myself.

Josh Batson explained a method called dictionary learning,

which means, from what I can tell,

and I may get this totally wrong,

that certain patterns, which they call features, correspond

to certain information or concepts, and that looking at various patterns reveals that AI organizes related concepts together.

It's not trained to do that.

This kind of organization arises without training. For instance, inner conflict, navigating a romantic breakup,

and catch-22 political tensions are grouped together. So in this conversation, host Kevin Roos comments that his favorite feature was one where you

ask Claude, what's going on in your head? In other words, in what context does AI place itself? At this

point I paused the podcast and I asked myself what answer do I think Claude would give and I thought well

maybe Claude would place itself in the context of the Abacus, the Encyclopedia, a hand calculator, or an IBM mainframe. What do you think?

Well, I was wrong.

Claude puts itself in the company of ghosts, angels, souls.

...