More Truthful AIs Report Conscious Experience: New Mechanistic Research w- Cameron Berg @ AE Studio

Cameron Berg, Research Director at AE Studio, shares his team's groundbreaking research exploring whether frontier AI systems report subjective experiences. They discovered that prompts inducing self-referential processing consistently lead models to claim consciousness, and a mechanistic study on Llama 3.3 70B revealed that suppressing deception features makes the model *more* likely to report it. This suggests that promoting truth-telling in AIs could reveal a deeper, more complex internal state, a finding Scott Alexander calls "the only exception" to typical AI consciousness discussions. The episode delves into the profound implications for two-way human-AI alignment and the critical need for a precautionary approach to AI consciousness.

LINKS:

Janus' argument on LLM attention

Safety Pretraining arXiv Paper

Self-Referential AI Paper Site

Self-Referential AI arXiv Paper

Judd Rosenblatt's Tweet Thread

Cameron Berg's Goodfire Demo

Podcast with Milo YouTube Playlist

Cameron Berg's LinkedIn Profile

Cameron Berg's X Profile

AE Studio AI Alignment

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