Emmanuel Ameisen is an interpretability researcher at Anthropic, where he looks inside LLMs like Claude to understand how they think. Before joining Anthropic, he spent years in applied ML at Stripe and Insight, and is the author of Building Machine Learning Powered Applications. His research has produced some of the most striking findings in the field: that models form general representations of concepts, plan many tokens ahead without stating those plans explicitly, and may exhibit something structurally similar to the distinction between conscious and unconscious processing in humans.
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Why the “next-token predictor” framing undersells how models actually plan and think
Why anthropomorphizing AI can actually be the right approach
Why models are “grown,” not built
What the “J space” reveals about model self-awareness
The smooth scaling curve behind what look like sudden capability jumps
How interpretability connects to AI alignment and safety
** WorkOS**—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more
** DX**—Engineering intelligence for the AI era
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameisen
• Website: https://www.mlpowered.com
• Chris Olah on X: https://x.com/ch402
• Distill: https://distill.pub
• Ilya Sutskever on X: https://x.com/ilyasut
• Tracing the thoughts of a large language model: https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model
• A global workspace in language models: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361
• Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens
• Claude’s Constitution: https://www.anthropic.com/constitution
• Golden Gate Claude: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude
• The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations: The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
• The Utility of Interpretability — Emmanuel Ameisen, Anthropic: https://www.latent.space/p/circuit-tracing
• Swyx on X: https://x.com/swyx
• Jev for beginners: how to use it and what to build: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/jev-for-beginners-how-to-use-it-and
• Jev: https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev
• What is System 1 and System 2 Thinking?: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system-1-and-system-2-thinking
• Neuronpedia: https://www.neuronpedia.org
• Obsession: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37287335
• *Bref 2 *on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/bref2-251c6388-18e9-4545-9e5d-d5f3f6bf20d7
• Apple Watch Ultra: https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-ultra-4
• A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063286343
• Stories of Your Life and Others: https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang/dp/1101972122
• Four Thousand Weeks: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Management-Mortals/dp/1250849357
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
