“I find that the more you look inside, the less certain you are about how they work. And then oftentimes people that will confidently say like, ah, language models are just X or just Y are the people that actually haven't spent a while looking inside.”
Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · October 2026
Asked whether AI models are conscious, the Anthropic interpretability researcher says it's very hard to say either way. What he does believe is that most people underestimate the complexity that emerges inside the models: shared concepts, planning several tokens ahead, and mixed levels of reasoning.
Transcript
…know, when like a mouse gets hungry, like it sort of gets aggressive. What's going on with that? Right. And just like, well, I guess I'll run some experiments to see what the factors are. And so it's a very different kind of study than anything that I think most of us on the team have done before.
…on this, they didn't expect to create this new kind of almost life type of being. Do you think about consciousness as a part of this? Just like, do you think AI is conscious? Do you think it'll get to a place where we think it's conscious? Or is that just not even worth our time to think about?
…that they do so by like planning many tokens ahead, that they sort of have this mix between this higher order reasoning and lower reasoning. And all of that just kind of emerges is something that I think is underappreciated by people. And to me, it gives me, let's say, a deeper sense of like, ooh, there's a lot to still understand about how they work. I think maybe that's the main thing is I find that the more you look inside, the less certain you are about how they work. And then oftentimes people that will confidently say like, ah, language models are just X or just Y are the people that actually haven't spent a while looking inside.
And there's this, I don't know, thread of history through to how we got here, which is a lot of people did not think we would get to artificial intelligence that is useful by just investing in something that was seemingly very simple and just giving it a lot of compute. And that was famously…
I think it's two things actually, because I think it's not just compute. It's also finding an objective where compute keeps giving you returns. So what does that mean? You know, it's actually not that new of an idea. I mean, you're right. Like compute versus sort of, I would say, expert design…
This season's supporting
More from Lenny's Newsletter
