I don’t think that’s true—in eg the GPT-3 architecture, and in all major open-weights transformer architectures afaik, the attention mechanism is able to feed lots of information from earlier tokens and “thoughts” of the model into later tokens’ residual streams in a non-token-based way. It’s totally possible for the models to do real introspection on their thoughts (with some caveats about eg computation that occurs in the last few layers), it’s just unclear to me whether in practice they perform a lot of it in a way that gets faithfully communicated to the user.
I don’t think that’s true—in eg the GPT-3 architecture, and in all major open-weights transformer architectures afaik, the attention mechanism is able to feed lots of information from earlier tokens and “thoughts” of the model into later tokens’ residual streams in a non-token-based way. It’s totally possible for the models to do real introspection on their thoughts (with some caveats about eg computation that occurs in the last few layers), it’s just unclear to me whether in practice they perform a lot of it in a way that gets faithfully communicated to the user.