The search for consciousness inside LLMs | Mint
The search for consciousness inside LLMs | Mint
摘要: Global
The search for consciousness inside LLMs
The Economist
The Economist
min read
28 Aug 2026, 05:25 PM IST
OpenAI and Anthropic logos
正文
The search for consciousness inside LLMs
The Economist
The Economist
min read
28 Aug 2026, 05:25 PM IST
OpenAI and Anthropic logos are seen in this illustration
Anthropic’s researchers were able to look inside those layers, using a mathematical tool they had developed to do so.
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IN A RECENT experiment on Claude Sonnet 4.5, a large language model (LLM) from Anthropic, researchers asked it to count to five and, at the same time, “introspect deeply”. The artificial-intelligence model complied, returning: “One . Two . Three . Four . Five .” So far, so normal.
During the task, the researchers were watching what was going on inside the LLM’s many layers of artificial neural networks. When a user asks a question, the words are turned into chunks of text (tokens) that are then converted to numbers. These are then passed through the layers of artificial neurons until they reach the final layer, which produces a token. Repeat that process a bunch of times each second and you get a series of tokens that turn into a sentence or some other more complex response. For a long time these layers have remained a black box, largely impenetrable to anyone wanting to know how or why LLMs do things in the way they do.
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