How can a language model find the veggies in a menu? New pre-print where we investigate the internal mechanisms of LLMs when filtering on a list of options. Spoiler: turns out LLMs use strategies surprisingly similar to functional programming (think "filter" from python)! 🧵

Yascha Mounk and David Bau delve into the “black box” of AI.

About:The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) workshop aims to bring together academic and industry researchers from the New England and surround...

We're a research computing project cracking open the mysteries inside large-scale AI systems. The NSF National Deep Inference Fabric consists of a unique combination of hardware and software that provides a remotely-accessible computing resource for scientists and students to perform detailed and reproducible experiments on large pretrained AI models, such as open large language models. We aim to make AI interpretability research more accessible through this channel by publishing lectures and educational content covering real interpretability research.

🚨 Registration is live! 🚨 The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) Workshop is happening Aug 22nd 2025 at Northeastern University! A chance for the mech interp community to nerd out on how models really work 🧠🤖 🌐 Info: nemiconf.github.io/summer25/ 📝 Register: https://forms.gle/v4kJCweE3UUHUE81A

How do language models track mental states of each character in a story, often referred to as Theory of Mind? We reverse-engineered how LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct handles a belief-tracking task and found something surprising: it uses mechanisms strikingly similar to pointer variables in C programming!