Import AI 444: LLM societies; Huawei makes kernels with AI; ChipBench

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe.

Google paper suggests that LLMs simulate multiple personalities to answer questions:
…The smarter we make language models, the more they tend towards building and manipulating rich, multi-agent world models…
When thinking about hard problems, I often find it’s helpful to try and view them from multiple perspectives, especially when it comes to checking my own assumptions and biases. Now, researchers with Google, the University of Chicago, and the Santa Fe Institute, have studied how AI reasoning models work and have concluded they do the same thing, with LLMs seeming to invoke multiple different perspectives in their chains of thought when solving hard problems.

The key finding: In tests on DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B (one wonders why the Google researchers didn’t touch Google models here…) they find that “enhanced reasoning emerges not from extended computation alone, but from the implicit simulation of complex, multi-agent-like interactions—a society of thought—which enables the deliberate diversification and debate among internal cognitive perspectives characterized by distinct personality traits and domain expertise.”

How it works: It appears that different forms of persona and discussion style modeling emerge as a consequence of training models through RL to do reasoning - the results don’t show up on base pre-trained models like DeepSeek v3. The authors find that models embody a variety of conversational styles, including question and answering, perspective shifts, reconciliation, and conflict of perspectives.
“In an organic chemistry problem requiring multistep reaction analysis to identify the final product’s structure (i.e., multi-step Diels-Alder synthesis), DeepSeek-R1 exhibits perspective shifts and conflict, expressed through socio-emotional roles such as disagreement, giving opinion, and giving orientation,” they find.
Similarly, “In a creative writing trace where the model rewrites the sentence “I flung my hatred into the burning fire,” seven perspectives emerge, including a creative ideator (highest Openness and Extraversion) who generates stylistic alternatives and a semantic fidelity checker (low agreeableness, high neuroticism) who prevents scope creep—“But that adds ‘deep-seated’ which wasn’t in the original”.
And in a mathematical puzzle “at step 40, the model produces mechanical, enumerative chain-of-thought-style reasoning, whereas by step 120, two distinctive simulated personas have appeared, recognizing their collectivity with the pronoun “we”— expressing uncertainty (“Again no luck”), considering alternatives (“Maybe we can try using negative numbers”), and reflecting on problem constraints.”

Why this matters: ...