This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts
The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving.
Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or J-lens) and used it to uncover a hidden area, which they named the J-space, inside its flagship LLM, Claude.
The J-space contains words related to the response a model is working on but may not ultimately produce. If Claude were a person (which it is not), you might say these hidden words reveal what’s on its mind before it actually speaks.
Read the full story on what they found.
—Will Douglas Heaven
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has unveiled its long-awaited “super app”
ChatGPT Work blends its chatbot, coding tool, and new models. (Reuters $)
+ It’s designed to do your work for you and with you. (Ars Technica)
+ And arrived the same day as OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 models. (NYT $)
+ It’s also developing a fully automated researcher. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Humanoids have performed teleoperated surgery on living animals
In the world-first, they removed gallbladders from pigs. (Ars Technica)
+ The human work behind humanoids is hidden. (MIT Technology Review)
3 SK Hynix has landed the largest US listing by a foreign company
The South Korean chip giant raised $26.5 billion. (CNN)
+ Demand for AI data centres has led its profits to skyrocket. (Guardian)
+ But its jumbo share sale may be a sign of overheated times. (FT $)
+ South Korea’s hottest bachelors are chip workers. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Tencent is leading a deal to unwind Meta’s $2 billion Manus acquisition
It’s in talks to become the Chinese AI startup’s largest shareholder. (FT $)
+ Tencent will reportedly buy Manus for no less than $2 billion. (Reuters $)
+ Beijing had ordered Meta to unwind the acquisition. (Bloomberg $)
5 Resuscitated human retinas responded to light 10 hours after death
It’s a big step towards eye transplants that restore vision. (New Scientist $)
+ As is a new device that revives dead eyeballs. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Meta has started charging for AI access
A new version of Muse Spark has a paid tier for developers. (Quartz)
+ Meta also plans to start producing an AI chip in September. (Reuters $)
7 OpenAI and Google have sold AI models to blacklisted China groups
Via Singapore-based subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. (FT $)
8 A daughter tested an AI “death bot” of her father
The technology provided both comfort and unease. (New Yorker $)
9 An astronomer says the hunt for alien life needs more statistics
He wants to replace speculation with mathematical frameworks. (Quanta)
10 Pokémon Go players turned Times Square into a giant battlefield
More than 1,500 fans finally fulfilled the game’s 2016 launch promise. (Wired $)
+ Pokémon Go is also training world models. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“When we’re talking about AI, we love the hype, we get excited about it. The damn thing never actually lands in practice.”
—Vijay Janapa Reddi, an engineering professor at Harvard University, tells Wired why he’s skeptical about grand plans for AI.
One More Thing
Why we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs
In 1943, psychologist B.F. Skinner led a secret government project to make bombs more precise. His idea: teach pigeons to guide missiles by pecking at targets on a screen inside a warhead. To train them, Skinner rewarded the birds with food when they made the right decisions, using trial and error to shape their behavior.
Unsurprisingly, the military never deployed Skinner’s kamikaze pigeons. Yet his experiments convinced him that pigeons were “an extremely reliable instrument” for studying learning.
Decades later, those same principles would help power reinforcement learning, the technology behind some of today’s most advanced AI systems.
Discover how pigeons inspired one of AI’s most powerful techniques.
—Ben Crair
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Here’s a splendid selection of this year’s NSW architecture award winners.
+ Photographers have captured the Strawberry Moon’s golden glow in stunning detail.
+ Idiocracy is the film that best exemplifies the “American experience,” according to a new poll. Look back at the prescient comedy with this Screen Junkies trailer.
+ Get ready for the weekend with this psychedelic house journey from Jamie xx b2b Caribou.
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