Glossary · Term

entanglement

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Definition

Plain language

When several of the model's ideas are wired together so tightly that changing one drags the others along.

As stated in the literature

The property that distinct concepts share overlapping directions or circuitry in a model's representation space, so an edit targeting one belief non-locally perturbs correlated beliefs; contrasts with the folk model of local, surgical output editing.

Also called: entangled

Why it matters: It means edits to a model's beliefs are rarely surgical, so a fix aimed at one behavior can quietly break unrelated ones.

For example, trying to make a model less willing to describe itself as conscious might unexpectedly also change how it talks about emotions or self-awareness.

Heard on the show

“The register signal is early, strong, and entangled.”
Episode 241 — Swapping the Name Did Nothing, But Hedging Moved Every Model

Mentioned in 14 episodes

  1. 241
    Swapping the Name Did Nothing, But Hedging Moved Every Model
  2. 235
    Why Chatbot Safety Erodes 350 Messages Into a Real Conversation
  3. 231
    Silencing a Chatbot's 'I'm Conscious' Quietly Rewires Its Whole Worldview
  4. 175
    One Crosscoder Feature Flips a Stalling Chatbot Into a Working Agent
  5. 167
    How Teaching an AI to Predict, Not Act, Made It a Better Actor
  6. 166
    A Router That Beats the Frontier Models It Calls
  7. 150
    Don't Kill the Loser: A Different Way to Handle Two AI Agents Colliding
  8. 085
    Why Long-Context Models Might Need Compute, Not Capacity, Before Eviction
  9. 081
    When Reasoning Models Decide Before They Think: Detecting and Fixing Premature Confidence
  10. 075
    Growing Code and Proof Together: Verified Systems in Ten Hours Instead of a Year
  11. 055
    Why LLM Judges Flip Their Verdicts When You Change the Question Format
  12. 053
    An AI Agent Swapped In Focal Loss And Beat A Human-Tuned Training Script
  13. 051
    Why Parallel Sampling Plateaus, And What Evidence Graphs Do Instead
  14. 032
    A Sticky-Note for Every Layer: Letting Transformers Remember What They Were Just Thinking

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