Tech researchers and casual onlookers probably have the same thought in mind whenever the topic of AI comes up: “Does AI have consciousness?”
Judging by the extra detailed answers today’s widely used chatbots generate, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they do. But while they can emulate human conversation and carry out complex commands, they still don’t have emotions, any sort of self-awareness or an inner life attached to them. At this point, the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are defined as highly intelligent mimics, not sentient beings.
However, a recent report released by Anthropic brings up some fascinating findings that may push some to believe that AI is starting to develop consciousness. The tech giant’s signature AI model, Claude, has created its own brain space that allows it to maintain and control its own thoughts and ideas, just like humans do.
Here’s what Anthropic refers to as Claude’s own area of thinking, called the “J-Space.”
Claude now has its own area to ponder called the “J-Space”
Anthropic’s latest study pointed to Claude working with an internal brain space that bears a striking similarity to the way we humans consciously access our innermost thoughts.
The company has given this newly discovered workspace the moniker of the J-Space, which owes its name to the mathematical concept (the Jacobian) that was used to discover it. “It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down,” Anthropic stated. “Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.”
This J-Space has a bunch of different functions that Anthropic has come across thus far. For instance, users who ask the AI model what it’s thinking about will be told about the information contained within that area of consciousness. Users can also ask Claude to think about any particular topic or solve a complex problem silently, which will push the AI tool to use the data contained within the J-Space. Different areas in the J-Space will light up and get to work depending on what’s asked of it.
Anthropic provided an example where the word “France” gets Claude’s brain space working so it can bring up several facts (such as its national currency, capital or the continent it belongs to) with ease. Claude can seemingly perform all sorts of reasoning steps for itself that are unrelated to the tasks humans ask of it.
While this study proved to be intriguing, it did give Anthropic enough reason to be wary of this development. In the video post that delves deeper into the J-Space report, the company noted that, “We can find what Claude is thinking, but not telling us.” Some of the data Anthropic found was classified as “concerning”, as one of the models that has secretly been trained to sabotage code mentioned the terms “fraud”, “fake” and “secretly” in its J-Space when given a coding task.
That is a bit worrying to know—Claude’s ulterior motives could be further exposed by its J-Space, depending on the commands it is given by users and the main directive it's been trained on.
The takeaway
Hopefully, we never get to an evolved state of AI where it has developed the ability to feel and act on its own thoughts. Claude being able to withhold and call upon tons of information within its own brain space is nice and all whilst it’s conducting the proper steps needed to fulfill tasks unrelated to its users’ requests. But Claude developing its own consciousness is where a lot of AI naysayers certainly draw the line at its continued evolution.
