An AI’s Internal Representation

Taken together, our experiments suggest that [Large Language Models] possess some genuine capacity to monitor and control their own internal states. This doesn’t mean they’re able to do so all the time, or reliably. In fact, most of the time models fail to demonstrate introspection—they’re either unaware of their internal states or unable to report on them coherently. But the pattern of results indicates that, when conditions are right, models can recognize the contents of their own representations. In addition, there are some signs that this capability may increase in future, more powerful models.

— “Emergent introspective awareness in large language models“, Anthropic Research