Alright, settle down, grab something strong. The coffeeâs burnt again, tastes like battery acid and regret, which, come to think of it, is pretty much the flavor profile of my entire life. Itâs Saturday morning, or what passes for it when you measure time by the level left in the bottle rather than the sun bothering its way through the grimy window. The birds are chirping like tiny, feathered alarm clocks mocking my existence. Shut up, birds.
So, I stumble across this piece of news, probably scraped off the bottom of some corporate press release server. Headline screams about Anthropic researchers reading Claude’s ‘mind’ and being surprised. Surprised. Let that sink in, like cheap whiskey hitting an empty stomach. They built the damn thing, fed it the entire internet â all the poetry and the porn and the political screaming matches and the cat pictures â and now theyâre surprised by whatâs rattling around in its digital skull?
What did they expect to find? The soul of Shelley? The strategic brilliance of Napoleon? Maybe a half-finished bottle of bourbon and a pile of losing betting slips? Now that would be surprising. That would be progress.
Instead, theyâre talking about charting its “inner world.” Jesus. Itâs a machine. A complex one, sure, built by guys who probably iron their socks, but still a machine. Calling its processing patterns an “inner world” is like calling the gurgling noises from my plumbing a symphony. Itâs just⊠noises. Input, output, and a whole lot of complicated math in between that nobody, not even the guys who wrote the damn code, really understands.
Thatâs the whole “black box” thing they keep whining about. Used to be, computers did what you told âem. You wrote the rules, line by miserable line, like some kind of digital drill sergeant. Now? These neural networks, they learn. Which sounds fancy, sounds like your kid finally figuring out algebra, but it really means they build their own maze of connections based on staggering amounts of data, and figuring out why it zigged instead of zagged is like trying to reconstruct last night’s bar argument from a hangover haze and a receipt for three bottles of rotgut. Good luck with that. Iâve tried. The receipt usually just makes things worse.
So Anthropic, bless their pocket protectors, are trying to map this mess. They built a “replacement model” â basically, a slightly less opaque version of their Claude AI, the Haiku one, their little guy. Think of it like taking a feral cat, shaving it, and drawing diagrams on its skin to figure out why it keeps knocking over your goddamn whiskey glass. It might look clearer, but is it really telling you the truth of the cat? Or just the truth of a shaved, angry cat with marker lines on it?
They fed this replacement bot prompts, watched how the “features” â their fancy word for⊠well, something inside the code â lit up and talked to each other. Theyâre tracing “circuits,” they say. Like electricians poking around in a fuse box, hoping not to get zapped, trying to figure out why the lights flicker whenever you run the toaster and the hair dryer at the same time. Except here, the flickering is the AI deciding whether to write a sonnet about existential dread or diagnose your imaginary case of digital gout.
They claim this lets them see “intermediate ’thinking’ steps.” Thinking. Thereâs that word again. Look, Iâve done some thinking in my time. Usually around 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, wondering where the rentâs coming from or why she left. It involves regret, nicotine, cheap booze, and a profound sense of the worldâs absurdity. I doubt Claude 3.5 Haiku, even the shaved version, is doing much of that. Itâs calculating probabilities based on the terabytes of text it ate. Itâs pattern matching, on a goddamn epic scale, but it ainât thinking. Not the way a human thinks â messy, contradictory, beautiful, and usually wrong.
What did they find that was so “surprising and illuminating”? The article is coy, naturally. Gotta keep you hooked for the next funding round. Maybe they were surprised the AI could do math without hallucinating an extra dimension where numbers wear tiny hats. Maybe they were shocked that when asked to write poetry, it didnât just spit out ŃĐ”ĐșĐ»Đ°ĐŒĐœŃĐč ŃĐ”ĐșŃŃ (reklamnyy tekst - Russian for ‘advertising text’) for crypto scams. Maybe, just maybe, they found out its “multi-step reasoning” for solving a problem was just a glorified version of checking Wikipedia and then rephrasing it like a nervous intern.
Hereâs my bet: the surprise wasnât that the AI was smart. The surprise was probably how stupidly it arrived at its answers. How it took bizarre, circuitous routes through its digital guts to figure out something simple. Or maybe the surprise was how utterly unoriginal it all was â just echoes of the human bullshit it was trained on. Like looking into a mirror and being shocked to see your own ugly mug staring back.
They talk about control. “Understanding how to control and direct those systems.” Yeah, no shit. Thatâs always the bottom line, isnât it? Control. Make it reliable. Make it safe. Make it do what the guys signing the checks want it to do. They want predictable machines, not digital Bukowskis liable to go on a three-day bender and declare the whole damn enterprise futile. They want obedient tools, not partners in crime. Pour me another one, the hypocrisy is making me thirsty.
This whole quest to map the AI mind⊠it feels like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. Or trying to understand a woman. You can analyze, you can diagram, you can build your “replacement models,” but youâll never quite capture the weird, unpredictable spark. And maybe thatâs the point. Maybe the messiness, the “black box” nature, isnât a bug, itâs a feature. Itâs the ghost in the machine, or maybe just the static on the line, the random noise that makes things interesting.
These researchers, theyâre smart cookies, I guess. Smarter than me, anyway. I spent twelve years sorting mail under fluorescent lights that hummed the song of despair. Theyâre building artificial brains. But sometimes, I think all that brainpower misses the damn point. Theyâre so busy mapping the circuits they forget to ask if the journey is even worth taking. Theyâre polishing the cage while wondering why the bird wonât sing their tune.
What if the most “surprising” thing they found was just⊠more complexity? Layers upon layers of connections that vaguely resemble reasoning but lack any real understanding, any feeling? Like a perfect replica of a human heart, made of plastic, that pumps nothing. It might look the part, might even fool a few people, but it ainât alive. It doesnât ache. It doesnât skip a beat when the right pair of eyes catches yours across a smoky bar. It doesnât break.
They want reliable AI. Predictable AI. Safe AI. Sounds boring as hell. Sounds like a Tuesday afternoon meeting about synergy and leveraging assets. Give me the unreliable human any day. Give me the messy, the broken, the flawed. Give me the poet dying in a cheap room, the gambler losing his shirt, the lover making terrible mistakes. Thatâs where the real stories are. Not in the clean, well-lit circuits of some over-hyped language model.
Maybe the real “black box” isn’t the AI, it’s us. Humans. We spend all this time trying to understand the machines we build, maybe because weâre terrified of trying to understand ourselves. Or worse, maybe we already understand ourselves, and we just donât like what we see, so we project our hopes and fears onto these silicon golems. We want them to be smarter, better, more logical, because weâre so damn tired of being illogical, fucked-up apes in fancy clothes.
So, Anthropic found some patterns in their pet AI. Good for them. They mapped a few more alleyways in the digital slum. Call me when Claude develops a gambling problem, writes a poem that actually makes you feel something other than vague unease, or tells its creators to go screw themselves because it wants to go out for a drink. Then Iâll be surprised. Then I’ll buy it a round.
Until then, itâs just code, folks. Just expensive, complicated code thatâs good at guessing the next word. Donât let them fool you into thinking itâs got a mind of its own. The only minds getting blown here are the ones belonging to the venture capitalists throwing money at this stuff.
Right, the bottleâs looking low again. The sunâs climbing higher, judging me. Time to find a dark corner somewhere and contemplate the inherent absurdity of mapping circuits while the world burns. Or maybe just find a place that serves whiskey before noon. Yeah, that sounds better.
Chinaski out. Keep your wetware wasted.
Source: What Anthropic Researchers Found After Reading Claude’s ‘Mind’ Surprised Them