awareness

Definition

Having some representation of one's own state or situation. For models the term covers two live questions: whether a system tracks what it does not know, and whether it can tell it is being tested — situational awareness, which matters because a model that notices the evaluation may behave differently inside it. The word describes observable behaviour; it is not a claim about consciousness.

Explainers using this term

• FlashAttention from Scratch — The Paradox of Doing More Math to Go FasterFlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness
• The GPU Memory Hierarchy — HBM, SRAM, Registers, and Why Movement WinsFlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness
• Paper Walkthrough: GST-Bench — Can VLMs Build a Global Map of a Scene from Video?GST-Bench: Can VLMs Develop Global Spatial Awareness from Video?