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How does ChatGPT ‘think’? Psychology and neuroscience crack open AI large language models

Researchers are striving to reverse-engineer artificial intelligence and scan the ‘brains’ of LLMs to see what they are doing, how and why.
  1. Matthew Hutson

    1. Matthew Hutson is a science writer based in New York City.

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Cartoon of a large brain-shaped machine made of many computer parts being examined by two puzzled researchers.

Illustration: Fabio Buonocore

David Bau is very familiar with the idea that computer systems are becoming so complicated it’s hard to keep track of how they operate. “I spent 20 years as a software engineer, working on really complex systems. And there’s always this problem,” says Bau, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Nature 629, 986-988 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01314-y

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 17 May 2024: An earlier version of this article contained an error in the box ‘False logic’. The explanation for the correct answer should have said B.

References

  1. Grosse, R. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.03296 (2023).

  2. Li, K. et al. in Proc. Int. Conf. Learn. Represent. 2023 (ICLR, 2023); available at https://openreview.net/forum?id=DeG07_TcZvT

  3. Hagendorff, T. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.13988 (2023).

  4. Wei, J. et al. in Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 35 (eds Koyejo, S. et al.) 24824–24837 (Curran Associates, 2022); available at https://go.nature.com/3us888x

  5. Turpin, M., Michael, J., Perez, E. & Bowman, S. R. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.04388 (2023).

  6. Zou, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.01405 (2023).

  7. Meng, K., Sharma, A. S., Andonian, A. J., Belinkov, Y. & Bau, D. in Proc. Int. Conf. Learn. Represent. 2023 (ICLR, 2023); available at https://openreview.net/forum?id=MkbcAHIYgyS

  8. Hase, P., Bansal, M., Kim, B. & Ghandeharioun, A. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2301.04213 (2023).

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