Anthropic already showed that the “emotional states” or “vectors” have correlates in both the activations of the transformers, and in future outputs. Change the state, change the outputs, with measurable results, so they’re load bearing, like you say. Load bearing for what? I don’t know, I’m inclined towards “not much”, a better predictor of what the model will say, maybe?
My suggestion is lets get rid of the “constitutional part” of CLaude by looking for those same correlates at the training checkpoint after the helpful only RLHF, but before the SFT and RLAIF training stages. That would help us see if Claude is just parroting back its own constitutional training, or if there is a bigger “there-there”. (Though that pipeline was back in 2022, I have no idea what’s going down in the training pipeline now—Opus yelling at Mythos over sophistry in their constitution...)
What do you mean by across continuation(s)? This seems like an interesting thread, but we should be on the same page about terminology.