LLMs represent information using high-dimensional neural activity. A small bit of this activity appears to be privileged, available to the model to be described, modulated, and reasoned with. I expect that understanding this "workspace" is key to making sense of LLM cognition.
New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.
Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.
We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.