Opening AI's Black Box with Prof. David Bau, Koyena Pal, and Eric Todd of Northeastern University

In this episode, we dive deep into the inner workings of large language models with Professor David Bau and grad students Koyena Pal and Eric Todd from Northeastern University. Koyena shares insights from her Future Lens paper, which shows that even mid-sized language models think multiple tokens ahead. Eric discusses the fascinating concept of Function Vectors - complex patterns of activity spread across transformer layers that enable in-context learning. Professor Bau connects the dots between these projects and the lab's broader interpretability research agenda, identifying key abstractions that link low-level computations to higher-level model behaviors. SPONSORS: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive ODF is where top founders get their start. Apply to join the next cohort and go from idea to conviction-fast. ODF has helped over 1000 companies like Traba, Levels and Finch get their start. Is it your turn? Go to http://beondeck.com/revolution to learn more. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off www.omneky.com The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR Plumb is a no-code AI app builder designed for product teams who care about quality and speed. What is taking you weeks to hand-code today can be done confidently in hours. Check out https://bit.ly/PlumbTCR for early access. Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to choosesquad.com and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist. TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (04:03) Reverse Engineering AI (10:10) Factual Knowledge Localization (16:34) Sponsors: Oracle | Omneky | On Deck (18:27) Future Lens Paper Intro (23:54) Choosing GPT-J (26:54) Vocabulary Prediction (30:36) Sponsors: Brave | Plumb | Squad (33:13) Fixed Prompt (35:57) Soft Prompt (41:32) Future Lens Results Analysis (51:50) Tooling & Open Source Code (56:07) Larger Models & Mamba Probes (1:04:10) Function Vectors Paper (1:09:39) Extracting & Patching Vectors (1:13:30) Encoding Task Understanding (1:15:36) Expert Models Implications (1:18:09) Conclusion