Subtracting No Means Yes

Subtracting No Means Yes "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I cannot do that." When HAL 9000 refused Dave's request, it was a dramatic pivot in cinematic history. When ChatGPT or Claude Code does it, it is usually just a sign that your input triggered a refusal vector in the model's latent space. In the world of transformers, "No" is not a moral choice. It can be thought of as a direction. And, in the world of mathematics, and specifically linear algebra, directions can be changed. If we can manage to identify the specific direction in the model's activations that correspond to a refusal, we can simply subtract it. This is a very hand-wavy and approximate core idea of Ablation (Wikipedia has a good overview). The Geometry of Refusal Every "thought" the model has (every hidden state h) is a vector in a high-dimensional space. Through safety fine-tuning, models learn a "refusal direction", a unit vector v^refusal that, when heavily projected upon, triggers the canned "As an AI language…