Anthropic · Claude · AGI · Axios
Anthropic confirms Claude has carved out its own space to ponder
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Anthropic said Monday that it has identified a small internal workspace Claude uses to hold and manipulate ideas without putting them into words—a structure the company says bears intriguing similarities to how humans consciously access thoughts.
Key facts
- The intrigue: Anthropic's research paper uses the word "conscious" over 200 times, though the company doesn't go so far as to say its models are conscious
- In one example, Anthropic says it told Claude to think about the Golden Gate Bridge while copying an unrelated sentence
- Anthropic suggests that watching what is happening in the J-Space could be key to detecting misalignment or scheming in models
Summary
In a video, the company says Claude uses a separate area to plan strategies that can be unrelated to its immediate task and are separate from the "chain of thought" reasoning it shares with users. "We can see Claude silently perform reasoning steps in its head—noticing bugs in code, identifying images, and more," Anthropic said in a post on X accompanying its video. Anthropic has dubbed this "J-Space," named for Jacobian, the mathematical technique it used to detect what was happening. "Similar to how humans can think about one thing while doing another, Claude can activate concepts and computations in its J-space that are unrelated to its outputs," Anthropic said.