The J-Space.
It emerged on its own.
News Items is “the most valuable newsletter out there.” — Peggy Noonan.
1. Anthropic:
As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words. Most of this processing is invisible to you. But some of what takes place in your brain you do have access to—an image that pops into your head, or a deliberate plan you make about where to go shopping. Neuroscientists and philosophers sometimes refer to the latter type of brain activity as “consciously accessible,” to distinguish it from all the other processing that goes on unconsciously. This activity has special properties: we can describe it, control it, and use it for deliberate reasoning, in contrast to all the automatic processing that goes on without our awareness.
In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.
We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process. (Source: anthropic.com. Italics mine.)
2. President Trump has said the US-Iran ceasefire is “over” following renewed military strikes between the two countries. Speaking at the Nato summit in Ankara, the US president told reporters: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” The US president’s comments came after the US and Iran traded military strikes on Tuesday evening. The Pentagon said it was responding to attacks on ships by the Islamic republic in the Strait of Hormuz. US Central Command announced what it said were “powerful strikes against Iran”, hours after the Treasury revoked a general license allowing sales of Iranian oil. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said its forces had responded, with missile and drone strikes early on Wednesday targeting 85 sites at US military facilities. (Source: ft.com)
3. President Trump is “completely committed” to NATO, the alliance’s secretary-general Mark Rutte said on Wednesday, as leaders gathered for a summit in Ankara overshadowed by fraying transatlantic unity and the US president’s mercurial attitude to his allies. “He is completely committed to this. There is complete commitment of the United States to NATO,” Rutte told reporters as he arrived at the second day of the summit. His comments came hours after Trump threatened to remove all American troops from Europe and revived calls for the US to take control of Greenland. (Source: ft.com)
