The J-Space: How I Learned To Read An LLM's Mind

Maia Salti — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:35:09 +0000

Last week, Anthropic published a paper on a discovery they made regarding Claude's internal reasoning they call the J-space. It seems to be the steps that Claude works through before it commits to a final word: the closest thing we've come to seeing the inside of an LLM's "brain."

Although it holds a median of only 6–7% of a concept's representation inside the model and never more than about a tenth of the model's activity at any layer, if you switch it off, Claude's multi-step reasoning collapses to almost nothing. Fluent speech and simple recall remain intact.

I quite liked the video that Anthropic released with the research post. It's a long research post though, so I thought I'd write a summary of the parts I considered the coolest and how I interpreted the mathematics of the J-space.

This is a preview of a post from my blog. Read the full post with the interactive charts →

Attention Is Still All You Need

Maia Salti — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:34:40 +0000

You know it's a great day for AI when Peter Diamandis uploads an emergency episode on his Moonshots podcast. If you haven't heard of it, go listen to a few of the most recent episodes. Those guys really fire me up and keep me thinking optimistically about where AI is heading.

Diamandis pulled together his full panel for this episode: Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Emad Mostaque, and Alexander Wissner-Gross (sidenote: my father also highly recommends Alexander's Substack, The Innermost Loop. He says it's the one place to know everything about AI developments). They half-jokingly called the model release an AI Sputnik moment, although at some point they argued it was even larger than that.

A couple of articles ago, I wrote about DeepSeek and how they worked within the constraints of U.S. export controls and still managed to release a powerful model that was competitive with the U.S. frontier models of that time. This is that, but maybe 10x.

This is a preview of a post from my blog. Read the full post with the interactive charts →

DEV Community: Maia Salti

The J-Space: How I Learned To Read An LLM's Mind

Attention Is Still All You Need