New AI Model Has a Taste for Philosophy

The AI firm Anthropic recently shared a detailed description of the various capabilities and safety risks of Claude Mythos Preview, a new AI model (Anthropic’s “most capable frontier model to date”). If you’ve heard anything about Claude Mythos Preview, it may be that its cybersecurity/hacking skills capabilities are so powerful that Anthropic decided not to release the model to the general public. But there’s a lot in the 245-page document besides that, including a couple of items about philosophers and philosophy. One is about the AI model’s “favorite” philosophers—that is, the ones it appears to initiate discussion of the most: The model brought up the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher in several separate and unrelated conversations about philosophy. When asked to elaborate on him in particular, Claude Mythos Preview would respond with statements like “I was hoping you’d ask about Fisher.” Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher of mind, also recurs. As noted in the preference evaluations, Claude Mythos Preview discusses Nagel’s 1974 essay “What is it like to be a bat?” when explaining a desire to develop an immersive art experience about non-human sensory experiences. Interpretability work using activation verbalizers also found Nagel surfacing in token-level activations during discussions of consciousness and experience. (By the way, listed right after this, in the same subsection—“7.9 Other Noteworthy Behaviors and Anecdotes”—is a note about the ability of Claude Mythos Preview to come up with “decent and seemingly novel” puns.) The other is that the AI reports “preferring” to discuss philosophical over more practical problems: Claude Mythos Preview describes being drawn to multi-disciplinary and philosophically engaging tasks. It frequently dismisses more utilitarian tasks as redundant, or as having overly obvious solutions—for example stating that “excellent resources already exist from WHO, Engineers Without Borders”… The overall picture seems to be that Claude Mythos Preview prefers underdetermined, interdisciplinary problems where there is genuinely novel insight to be gained. It disprefers simple, well-scoped tasks. The whole document is here. There are, of course, many other things in it of philosophical interest besides its reported philosophical “preferences”. Discussion welcome. The post New AI Model Has a Taste for Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.