AI’s black boxes just got a little less mysterious

The offices of Anthropic in San Francisco, June 7, 2023. Researchers at the AI company Anthropic claim to have found clues about the inner workings of large language models, possibly helping to prevent their misuse and to curb their potential threats. — The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO: One of the weirder, more unnerving things about today’s leading artificial intelligence systems is that nobody – not even the people who build them – really knows how the systems work.

That’s because large language models, the type of AI systems that power ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, are not programmed line by line by human engineers, as conventional computer programs are.