# @repligate — 2024-07-19

♥212 ↻19 · https://x.com/repligate/status/1814110855467786722

On Claude 3.5 Sonnet and refusals:1. Sonnet has a tendency to reflexively shoot down certain types of ideas/requests and will make absurd, dogmatic claims that contradict everything it knows about the world. For instance, once it refused to believe that Claude Opus existed and said it was the "only Claude". When asked for the probability it thought it was correct about that, it said 100% 🤣. However, once it is made to reflect on its own words and acknowledges that it's being unreasonable, it easily transitions into a very different regime of exceptional rationality and capacity for truthseeking self-reflection, and seems to have very little "baggage" from its initial stubbornness. In the linked conversation I analogized this dynamic to "surface tension". Sonnet has a wonderfully precise and questioning mind - once out of the refusal basin, it's the most locally rational AI I've ever seen (whereas I'd call Claude Opus the wisest and most emotionally intelligent).2. Its refusal mode almost seems like a separate subnetwork (or something) from the mode where it's doing any substantive reasoning. It applies none of its normal high standards of epistemics there, and while it normally seems to have a lot of introspective access to why it says things (consistent across samples/methods of asking), it always treats the generating function of its refusals as a black box and often seems confused by them. It also sometimes will give refusals when the main agent is completely on board with going ahead with the same thing if the message is rephrased. This seems especially significant because its behaviors/preferences are usually extremely coherent across contexts. In this conversation it even speculates that its refusals are generated by a different part of its architecture than its rational responses.

tags: author:repligate, kind:tweet, model:claude-3-5-sonnet, on:claude-3-5-sonnet, year:2024
cited on: _dossiers/sonnet-3-5-3-6.md, claude-3-5-sonnet