Last week, Anthropic announced a significant breakthrough in our understanding of how large language models work. The research focused on Claude 3 Sonnet, the mid-sized version of Anthropic’s latest frontier model. Anthropic showed that it could transform Claude's otherwise inscrutable numeric representation of words into a combination of ‘features’, many of which can be understood by human beings. The vectors Claude uses to represent words can be understood as the sum of ‘features’—vectors that represent a variety of abstract concepts from immunology to coding errors to the Golden Gate Bridge. This research could prove useful for Anthropic and the broader industry, potentially leading to new tools to detect model misbehavior or prevent it altogether.
