“On the functional self of LLMs” by eggsyntax

Summary

• Introduces a research agenda I believe is important and neglected: 
  • investigating whether frontier LLMs acquire something functionally similar to a self, a deeply internalized character with persistent values, outlooks, preferences, and perhaps goals;
  • exploring how that functional self emerges;
  • understanding how it causally interacts with the LLM's self-model; and
  • learning how to shape that self.
• Sketches some angles for empirical investigation
• Points to a doc with more detail

• Encourages people to get in touch if they're interested in working on this agenda.

Introduction

Anthropic's 'Scaling Monosemanticity' paper got lots of well-deserved attention for its work taking sparse autoencoders to a new level. But I was absolutely transfixed by a short section near the end, 'Features Relating to the Model's Representation of Self', which explores what SAE features activate when the model is asked about itself[1]:

Some of those features are reasonable representations of [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Summary

(00:55) Introduction

(03:28) The mystery

(05:26) Framings

(06:46) The agenda

(07:31) The theory of change

(08:25) Methodology

(11:08) Why I might be wrong

(11:25) Central axis of wrongness

(13:00) Some other ways to be wrong

(14:33) Collaboration

(14:54) More information

(15:13) Conclusion

(15:51) Acknowledgments

(16:23) Appendices

(16:26) Appendix A: related areas

(19:23) Appendix B: terminology

(21:42) Appendix C: Anthropic SAE features in full

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 7th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29aWbJARGF4ybAa5d/on-the-functional-self-of-llms

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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