What Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show
technologyreview.com

[It wasn't paywalled for me -- hope it's the same for others].

"What Anthropic learned was that LLMs have a space inside them—which Anthropic calls the J-space—filled with words that don’t appear in their output but that seem to influence the way they puzzle through problems. All this was hidden until Anthropic developed a new technique to probe its model Claude, so it’s a genuine discovery.

Sometimes these words keep track of where the LLM has got to in a particular task, sometimes they look more like flashes of recognition (for example, “protein” might pop up when you give an LLM only the letters of a protein sequence), and sometimes they represent a kind of internal commentary on the model’s decision-making. In my favorite example, Claude decided to cheat on a coding test when the word “panic” appeared.

Anthropic also found that LLMs are able to describe and manipulate the words in this space. So somehow they seem to be making use of it. "