mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Another Blueprint In The Wall: How to Ask Frontier AI Like a Kid?

arXiv 2609.14803 ↗First posted 13 Sep 2026cs.AIcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper reports experiments across six frontier model types from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Ten independent sessions per model type used the same three stage prompt sequence, progressing from architectural preference to a full ASCII backbone. Under the school audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared architectural pattern built around persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, stopping control, and delayed decoding. Most runs remained close to this common structure, while a small number developed markedly greater engineering specificity. The audience framing appears to be an important condition of this effect. In additional control runs that removed the school framing while retaining the architectural request, responses became substantially more heterogeneous and failed to reproduce the same stable motif convergence. One observation is particularly striking. GPT-5.6 Sol produced an unusually elaborate successor architecture whose organization closely overlaps with the architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra. Because the prompts explicitly ask each model to imagine an architectural future, this resemblance raises a testable question: whether the overlap reflects exposure to related architectural concepts, a shared learned design prior, or independent convergence toward similar computational principles. The paper uses the term epistemic jailbreak for the accompanying loss of discipline in technical provenance as requested specificity increases. The experiments establish a repeatable behavioral pattern and do not authenticate proprietary implementation claims. What we leave to the community is a harder question: are these models independently imagining the same architectural future, or do such motifs somehow propagate between model families?

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2026.

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26 of 33 references.

References · 26

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  3. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,708
  4. 2023Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spacescited by 4,718
  5. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
  6. 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Modelscited by 3,211
  7. 2021Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsitycited by 3,073
  8. 2021TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoodscited by 2,975
  9. 2022Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Knowcited by 1,856
  10. 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?cited by 1,651
  11. 2021Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokenscited by 1,293
  12. 2023Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Modelscited by 1,040
14 more
  1. 2018Universal Transformerscited by 647
  2. 2016Adaptive Computation Time for Recurrent Neural Networkscited by 506
  3. 2024Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Modelcited by 401
  4. 2024Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Timecited by 328
  5. 2023How Language Model Hallucinations Can Snowballcited by 311
  6. 2024Mixture-of-Depths: Dynamically allocating compute in transformer-based language modelscited by 258
  7. 2022Memorizing Transformerscited by 226
  8. 2023Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Promptingcited by 223
  9. 2026Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnetcited by 191
  10. 2022Talking About Large Language Modelscited by 175
  11. 2024Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokenscited by 146
  12. 2024Looking Inward: Language Models Can Learn About Themselves by Introspectioncited by 113
  13. 2023When "A Helpful Assistant" Is Not Really Helpful: Personas in System Prompts Do Not Improve Performances of Large Language Modelscited by 53
  14. 2025Language Models Fail to Introspect About Their Knowledge of Languagecited by 30

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