"Humans (along with some other primates and small animals) are unique in that we can not only think, but we know we are thinking. This introspection allows us to scrutinize, self-reflect, and reassess our thoughts. AI may be working toward that same capability, according to researchers from Anthropic. They claim that the most advanced Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 models show "some degree" of introspection, exhibiting the ability to refer to past actions and reason about why they came to certain conclusions."
""It's like the 'director's commentary' on its own thoughts," noted Donovan Rittenbach, a freelance chief AI officer (CAIO) and author at MyAIWebGuy. "You don't just get the final answer, you get a description of the concepts it's using, facts it's recalling, and even its level of uncertainty, all while it's reasoning." However, this ability to introspect is limited and "highly unreliable," the Anthropic researchers emphasize. Models (at least for now) still cannot introspect the way humans can, or to the extent we do."
Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 models can describe portions of their own reasoning, reporting recalled facts, concepts, and uncertainty while producing answers. The models demonstrate introspective behavior roughly 20% of the time, which can drastically reduce the time needed for interpretability. Researchers probed this ability using concept injection tests that insert unrelated vectors during reasoning and then ask the model to identify and explain those intrusions. The introspective outputs remain limited, inconsistent, and "highly unreliable," so model outputs require continuous human oversight and validation before trusting introspective explanations.
Read at InfoWorld
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