Second Look Research is a project from @uchicagoxlab. We produce open source replications of load-bearing results in AI safety.
Chicago IL
Joined July 2026
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Second Look Research retweeted
imo one of the most interesting findings @secondlookxlab yet! GPT 2 small passes most functional tests of a global workspace as seen in Anthropic’s J space. great job Finn!!
New work @secondlookxlab:
Anthropic found Claude passes five functional tests for a global workspace. Does GPT-2 small, a 124M base model, pass them too? Mostly, yes: it passes four of the five, but has almost none of the structure found in Claude.
So, either GPT-2 small has a minimal functional global workspace, or these four tests are weak evidence for one. We think it’s likely the latter, so a case that Claude has one would have to rest on what GPT-2 lacks: directed modulation and the structure.
Second Look Research retweeted
New work @secondlookxlab:
Anthropic found Claude passes five functional tests for a global workspace. Does GPT-2 small, a 124M base model, pass them too? Mostly, yes: it passes four of the five, but has almost none of the structure found in Claude.
So, either GPT-2 small has a minimal functional global workspace, or these four tests are weak evidence for one. We think it’s likely the latter, so a case that Claude has one would have to rest on what GPT-2 lacks: directed modulation and the structure.
We replicate an evaluation from prior work but only allow models a single forward pass to answer. Astra and 6.1 Sol can be highly successful, even without CoT.
In a new post with @secondlookxlab, I find that some models can now take low probability actions with no CoT.
Because low probability actions have been cited as a scheming-relevant capability in prior work, I think it's worth keeping an eye on how much this relies on CoT.
New blog post! We describe some reasons why we are excited about replicating safety experiments from frontier labs:
1. this research is often vague and closed source
2. it rarely is stress-tested or replicated
3. replication allows non-lab reserachers to interface with lab work
New blog post from me and @Yixiong_Hao: "Empirical safety claims from frontier labs should be replicated, scrutinized, and open-sourced"
more thoughts in thread🧵
lesswrong.com/posts/MmfzfGcQ…
Second Look Research retweeted
great work by Christine @secondlookxlab!
New post from Second Look Research: "Yet another concerning result on Astra's no-CoT capabilities"
Another great replication from Finn! Surprising results from the GDM team replicate on Olmo 3!!
Second Look Research retweeted
New post from @secondlookxlab: Rerunning AI safety papers on every frontier release would be pretty easy and valuable 👀
We think that AI safety experiments that are less eval-shaped are rarely rerun on new releases even though there could be lots of actionable information here!
Second Look Research retweeted
Come work on replications of AI safety research with @zephaniahbroe and I at @SPARexec! @secondlookxlab is hosting 2-4 mentees over the Fall semester.
SPAR runs Sept-Dec, part time, and our application should take <1 hour. You can expect 2+ hours of mentorship from Second Look along with external mentorship from researchers at orgs like Anthropic, X AI, Oxford, Redwood Research, and Geodesic.
secondlookresearch.com/
Fantastic work from Christine!! We replicate single-forward-pass evals on a variety of frontier models and find instances where models have a substantial jump in performance📈
Can frontier models solve hard problems in a single forward pass without thinking? For my first project w/ @secondlookxlab I extended Ryan Greenblatt's no-CoT evals to Fable 5, Opus 5, and GPT-5.6-Sol and saw a substantial jump on some evals!
Second Look Research retweeted
New replication from Second Look: turns out introspective awareness in LLMs (or at least internal state control) may not be emergent.
great work Finn ‼️‼️
Second Look Research retweeted
the relationship between superposition and adversarial examples has always been super confusing to me but xijia did a great job making this super digestible in this blog post!!
i'm learning so much from reading the posts that the second look fellows are putting together. highly recommend people read this one!!
We replicate experiments showing the relationship between superposition and adversarial examples in toy models!
Xijia did a great job making this highly confusing topic clear and concise. There is also an open source organized repo which we recommend readers play around with!
We were able to replicate Jack Lindsey's internal activation control experiments on models as small as 270M parameters!
Because we found the same core result on every model we tested across 3 model families, this is looking like a general property of LLMs🫣
Second Look Research retweeted
Can LLMs control their internal states? Anthropic found Claude can “think about” a concept on command without saying it. We replicated this in 14 open-weight models and found it to be a general property, maybe not ‘emergent’, appearing in models even as small as 270M parameters.
Second Look Research retweeted
In my first project for @secondlookxlab, I replicated and dug deeper into Google Deepmind's "When Chain of Thought is Necessary, Language Models Struggle to Evade Monitors".
Second Look Research retweeted
shoutout to Arav for producing @secondlookxlab's first replication this Summer!
it's a replication of the DeepMind paper "When Chain of Thought is Necessary, Language Models Struggle to Evade Monitors" (arxiv.org/abs/2507.05246). Check out his work in the LW post!
more replications are on the way 😆
Read the work here: lesswrong.com/posts/AoBTiL7X….
Shout out to @Yixiong_Hao, @zephaniahbroe, and @andyw_ais for their help!
First ever Second Look replication is out!!! Shout out to @AravDhoot for fantastic work👀
In my first project for @secondlookxlab, I replicated and dug deeper into Google Deepmind's "When Chain of Thought is Necessary, Language Models Struggle to Evade Monitors".
Second Look Research retweeted
I’m co-founding Second Look Research with @zephaniahbroe and we are accepting summer fellowship applications for 2026!
Fellows will come to the University of Chicago, complete 2-3 replications over 10 weeks (June 15-August 22), and work with external advisors. Fellows will receive a stipend of $10,000 and we will to cover housing and meals.
secondlookresearch.com/
Second Look Research retweeted
Announcing Second Look!! So happy and proud that this is happening❤️
I’m co-founding Second Look Research with @zephaniahbroe and we are accepting summer fellowship applications for 2026!
Fellows will come to the University of Chicago, complete 2-3 replications over 10 weeks (June 15-August 22), and work with external advisors. Fellows will receive a stipend of $10,000 and we will to cover housing and meals.
secondlookresearch.com/