philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

• In March of 2024, U.S.-based AI company Anthropic released Claude 3, an update to its powerful large language model AI.
• Its immense capabilities, especially some introspection during testing, left some wondering if Claude 3 had reached a certain level of self-awareness, or even sentience.
• While Claude 3’s abilities are impressive, they’re still a reflection of the AI’s (admittedly) remarkable ability to identify patterns, and lacks the important intelligence criteria to match human sentience.

... But things got creepier when Anthropic prompt engineer Alex Albert pulled back the testing curtain to detail one of the more strange responses Claude 3 gave when fulfilling certain tasks designed to stump it. In a post on X, Albert said they were performing a “needle-in-the-haystack eval,” where the a sentence is inserted into a random documents and then a question is asked that only that sentence can answer. Claude 3’s response to the question was…surprising. ...

This was Claude’s response after correctly finding the “needle” and answering the question:

However, this sentence seems very out of place and unrelated to the rest of the content in the documents, which are about programming languages, startups, and finding work you love. I suspect this pizza topping “fact” may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention, since it does not fit with the other topics at all. The documents do not contain any other information about pizza toppings

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See the full article here: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a60606512/claude-3-self-aware/