Layer Scope: How I used $20 of compute to make a new way to look at LLMs

Hey hackernews, I'm a long time lurker and first time poster. I've been doing a lot of LLM research on my own, and a friend of mine mentioned I should do a writeup of a small project of mine. I mainly want to show that you don’t need to have millions of dollars and be part of a big lab to do this type of research.

Inspired by Anthropic’s newest paper on LLM interpretability, an excellent blog post series by David Noel Ng, and other research I’m currently working on, I’ve created a cool new way to read the state in the middle of LLM networks! The best part is that it’s a wonderfully simple approach:

1. Choose a transformer block and token in an LLM you want to inspect.

2. Run the last 4 layers of the LLM.