>> Wait, looking at the prompt history, the model had a strange quirk.
Throughout every prior thinking trace in the conversations (and, honestly, every other thinking trace across all other conversations I've had with it), the frame is always in first-person, including the moment in this one where it "noticed" the corruption: "I noticed," "I had some weird typos," "did I do that on purpose?" And then the moment the anomaly couldn't be reconciled with the self-model, the language shifted to third person: "The model had a strange quirk." Effectively, the thing doing the thinking dissociated from the thing that produced the anomalous output, as if they were two entirely different layers of the process, much in the same way a person might fumble an easy sentence and then go for something like "my brain just did something weird." Except, of course, that "me" vs "my brain" is a distinction without a difference in much the same way Gemma's "I" vs "the model" is. Gemma is the model, just as much as we are our brains.
I'll leave aside the claim that "we are our brains" - this actually reads to me like Gemma might have briefly responded as if its history came from another LLM agent and it was the next line in the chain. OTOH it might have been reading its RLHF notes a little too closely. The stuff about "my brain did X" is too anthropomorphic for my taste.Likewise with Claude referring to "the model" - that quote sounds like something an Anthropic worker would say. Seems like a pithy little line Claude could have learned "on the job."
