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Technology

Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models

We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representations of known concepts into a model's activations, and measuring the influence of these manipulations on the model's self-reported states. We find that models can, in certain scenarios, notice the presence of injected concepts and accurately identify them. Models demonstrate some ability to recall prior internal representations and distinguish them from raw text inputs. Strikingly, we find that some models can use their ability to recall prior intentions in order to distinguish their own outputs from artificial prefills. In all these experiments, Claude Opus 4 and 4.1, the most capable models we tested, generally demonstrate the greatest introspective awareness; however, trends across models are complex and sensitive to post-training strategies. Finally, we explore whether models can explicitly control their internal representations, finding that models can modulate their activations when instructed or incentivized to "think about" a concept. Overall, our results indicate that current language models possess some functional introspective awareness of their own internal states. We stress that in today's models, this capacity is highly unreliable and context-dependent; however, it may continue to develop with further improvements to model capabilities.

Hacker News · 14 hours ago

Technology

Apple Extends 2026 Back to School Promotion Until September 24

Related coverage: Apple Extends 2026 Back to School Promotion Until September 24 MacRumors Save on MacBooks, iPads, AirPods and Apple Watches with Apple back-to-school deals CNN The Top 10 Student Discounts on Streaming Services, Subscriptions and Tech The Hollywood Reporter Apple extends 2026 Back to School deals on Macs and iPads until September 24 9to5Mac College shopping 2026: Student discounts on Apple and more can save families $328 WRAL

MacRumors · 14 hours ago