Past event — This event ended 2 days ago.
Inside Claude’s J-Space: Digital Minds Reading Group
About the event
*NOTE: This is a rescheduling of a previously posted event, as your host will be out of town for work, discussing digital minds at an AI safety workshop. I apologize for the inconvenience and hope you can still join us! If not, we'll spend a bit more time on this piece at next month's reading group, on October 8.*
Join DC Digital Minds for the first meeting of our new monthly reading group, where we’ll gather to explore important new work on AI minds, behavior, cognition, and moral status.
For our inaugural discussion, we’ll discuss Anthropic’s blog post, “[A Global Workspace in Language Models](https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace).” The researchers identify a collection of internal representations they call the J-space, which appears to make certain information available across different parts of the model for reporting, reasoning, and guiding behavior. Anthropic connects these findings to the idea of access consciousness, a functional concept drawn from philosophy and cognitive science.
What does that mean? How strong is the evidence? What does the paper establish, and what remains uncertain? We'll carefully digest what Anthropic has put forward, understand the methods and claims, ask good questions, and decide for ourselves what we think.
Beginners Welcome No specialized technical background is required. Whether you work professionally in AI, approach these questions through philosophy or social science, or are simply find it fascinating, you're warmly invited. We’ll work through the paper together rather than expecting everyone to arrive as an expert. *Come for the interpretability research -- stay for the interesting people and thoughtful conversation.*
Before the Meeting Please read Anthropic’s blog post, linked above. Those who would like to go deeper are encouraged, but not required, to read the full paper, "[Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html)."
This will be the first gathering of a monthly DC Digital Minds reading group, which will normally be on the second Thursday of the month (with this month an exception). Future selections will explore research and ideas relevant to understanding increasingly complex AI systems and navigating their place in human society.
