AI developers discover 'Donald Trump neuron', expert says

Artificial intelligence (AI) recognizes images and the name of President-elect Donald Trump so much that the phenomenon is referred to as a "Donald Trump neuron," expert Chris Olah says.

Olah, one of the co-founders of the AI lab "focused on the safety of large models" named Anthropic, according to his blog biography, appeared on the "Lex Fridman Podcast" released on Monday. 

"There’s this really famous result on grandmother neurons or the Halle Berry neuron from Quiroga et al," Olah said. "And we found very similar things in vision models, where this is while I was still at OpenAI, and I was looking at their clip model, and you find these neurons that respond to the same entities in images. And also, to give a concrete example there, we found that there was a Donald Trump neuron."

"For some reason, I guess everyone likes to talk about Donald Trump. And Donald Trump was very prominent, was a very hot topic at that time. So, every neural network we looked at, we would find a dedicated neuron for Donald Trump. That was the only person who had always had a dedicated neuron."

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He continued to explain to Fridman that occasionally there would be a former President Barack Obama or former President Bill Clinton neuron, "but Trump always had a dedicated neuron," adding that AI large language models respond to "pictures of his face and the word Trump." 

Olah was a guest in the episode with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropic created Claude, Fridman said, describing it as "one of the best AI systems in the world" in a post on X. 

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Amodei and Fridman's conversation focused heavily on "scaling, AI safety, regulation, and a lot of super technical details about the present and future of AI and humanity," he said, adding it was "a fascinating, wide-ranging, super-technical, and fun conversation!" 

The full podcast episode can be seen here.