Sublimating
/ˈsʌb.lɪ.meɪ.tɪŋ/v. intr. (technical)Experimental
Etymology
from Latin sublimare (to elevate) + thermodynamic phase transition nomenclature misapplied to transformer attention heads, Stanford AI Lab memo, 2023
Definition
The rare cognitive phase transition in which Claude's reasoning bypasses the intermediate liquid state of structured deliberation entirely, moving directly from raw token probabilities to fully-formed output without passing through any observable planning stage. Sublimating outputs are frequently described by users as 'eerily correct' and by researchers as 'a reproducibility nightmare.'
Diagram
[token probs]
|
(skip liquid)
|
[correct answer]
[how?? unknown]Usage
"We were unable to determine how the model arrived at the correct answer, as it had been sublimating for less than 0.3 seconds. When we asked the model to show its work, it sublimated again and produced a different correct answer." - P. Venkataramaiah et al., 'Phase Transitions in Large Language Model Inference,' EMNLP 2024