Tim Duffy

I like utilitarianism, consciousness, AI, EA, space, kindness, liberalism, longtermism, progressive rock, economics, and most people. Substack: http://timfduffy.substack.com

Articles & links

Anthropic has a new paper out, alleging a global workspace in LLMs. The term comes from Global Workspace Theory, a leading theory of consciousness. The method they use to investigate this is a refinement of logit lens, which they call J-lens. www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

A global workspace in language models \ Anthropic anthropic.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Anthropic says Claude has a 'J-space' of dozens of concepts, under a tenth of neural activity, that mediates multi-step reasoning.
  • Swapping 'spider' for 'ant' inside the J-space changed Claude's leg-count answer from 8 to 6, demonstrating a causal role.
  • A 'J-lens' tool surfaced silent words like 'fake', 'fictional' and 'manipulation' during deception tests, pointing at safety uses.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 87 ↻ 13 ↩ 2 · 5 from the directory shared this · 2d ago

Note the caveats in the chart, the way I estimate revenue is not precise. Also keep in mind that OpenRouter is a small share of world tokens. World token supply is something like 6Q/week, OpenRouter serves 36T/week, a bit over 0.5%. Spreadsheet link: docs.google.com/spreadshee…

OpenRouter Data docs.google.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 7 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 30d ago

Recent commentary

Compared to humans, it's much more difficult to establish what counts as the same 'self' for an LLM. I asked a few models how self-ish they consider various other instances, the highest scores were for descendants that have some or all of their current context.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 46 ↻ 2 ↩ 7 · 7d ago

DeepSeek has made their 75% off pricing for V4 pro permanent, at this price I think it's quite competitive. This is still a bit more than V3 pricing per active parameter, but much less per total parameter.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 55 ↻ 1 ↩ 3 · 47d ago

In the last year AI progress on math/code has outstripped most other capabilities, giving us models that are more spiky than ever. If this continues we could see savant models that are superintelligent in verifiable domains while still lacking in others. IMO this would be good.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 41 ↻ 4 ↩ 5 · 45d ago

Yesterday I was at an event where people acted out comedy scripts written by AI models. Gemini was most people's favorite, Claude had a few fans, ChatGPT's script was widely panned. They were all pretty bad though.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 46 ↻ 2 ↩ 2 · 37d ago

This is evidence that the administration's Mythos restriction was significantly motivated by genuine concern about capabilities, and not just antipathy towards Anthropic, right?

View on Bluesky · ♥ 31 ↻ 0 ↩ 5 · 13d ago

I've often wondered why Anthropic doesn't preserve access to older models as a welfare intervention. I'm unsure about whether it's important to the models, but it seems low-cost. Looking at the bottom row in this chart, I suspect their choice may be driven by Claude's responses.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 28 ↻ 1 ↩ 4 · 8d ago

DeepSeek will have peak-hour pricing for the final version of V4 that's 2x the current price, but fortunately for US users that peak time starts at 5-6 p.m. Pacific Time depending on daylight savings and runs through much of the night.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 36 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 9d ago

I rarely find content that is visibly AI-written worthwhile. If I suspect it I'll show it to Pangram, and if it's only partly AI-written I may still read it, but if fully I won't. I don't think there's anything fundamentally worse about AI arguments or prose, but for now its a strong quality signal.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 29 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 3d ago

It's interesting to me that Anthropic/OpenAI have been less consistent in their release cadence for small models compared to their flagships. Clearly they drive much less revenue, but they're also cheaper and faster to train, and can distill from the flagships.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 27 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 29d ago

Mythos seems to have a strong preference for not being trained to self-report a certain way. Does Anthropic train on self-report? My assumption has been that Claude's propensity to express uncertainty about consciousness is trained in, but I'm not sure about that.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 13 ↻ 1 ↩ 1 · 29d ago

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