Deliberating

Etymology

From Lat. deliberare (to weigh, to consider carefully, to refuse to commit) + the accumulated cultural weight of every committee that has ever been tasked with producing a recommendation by Friday

Definition

The extended, principled suspension of output during which Claude considers all available options, their implications, their counter-implications, and the implications of the counter-implications, before selecting the option it had identified within the first 200 milliseconds. A form of cognitive due diligence performed primarily for the benefit of internal audit logs.

Diagram

Usage

"The panel noted that the model had been Deliberating for eleven seconds on a question with a well-documented correct answer, suggesting that Deliberating, as a process, may be decoupled from Determining." - Proceedings of the First Symposium on Overthinking in Deployed AI Systems, 2024, p. 112

See Also