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Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Inside the black box of AI: How AI models actually think | Emmanuel Ameisen (Anthropic)

Oct 18, 2026 · 1h 12m

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About this episode

Emmanuel Ameisen is an interpretability researcher at Anthropic, where he looks inside LLMs like Claude to understand how they think. Before joining Anthropic, he spent years in applied ML at Stripe and Insight, and is the author of Building Machine Learning Powered Applications . His research has produced some of the most striking findings in the field: that models form general representations of concepts, plan many tokens ahead without stating those plans explicitly, and may exhibit something structurally similar to the distinction between conscious and unconscious processing in humans. We discuss: 1. Why the “next-token predictor” framing undersells how models actually plan and think 2.…