“No Space Like J-Space” by Zvi

There is a new very cool Anthropic paper: Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models. You can read the blog post verison here.

I encourage reading of the whole original blog post or paper, if you have the time.

Table of Contents

1. Through A Different Lens.
2. Establishing J-Space As A Global Workspace.
3. Are You Pondering What I’m Pondering?
4. Assistant J.
5. The Power Of Virtuous Thinking.
6. High Praise.
7. Everyone Remains Confused About Consciousness.
8. Further Research.
9. Don’t Think.

Through A Different Lens

They call this discovered area of ‘conscious access,’ where things are available for the model to do what in humans we would call conscious reasoning, the ‘J-space,’ after a new interpretability technique called the Jacobian Lens.

The Jacobian Lens computes, for each layer, the average causal effect of changes in the residual stream on the model's eventual outputs, averaged across a wide variety of contexts. Then you can trace what concepts are associated with each layer as the model proceeds through.

At each layer, the J-lens vectors form an overcomplete set.

… We observe that only a relatively small [...]

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Outline:

(00:26) Through A Different Lens

(02:02) Establishing J-Space As A Global Workspace

(04:55) Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

(08:50) Assistant J

(09:42) The Power Of Virtuous Thinking

(17:08) High Praise

(22:37) Everyone Remains Confused About Consciousness

(31:17) Further Research

(34:26) Don't Think

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First published:
July 7th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EnxHPxJT4Xin5cTsX/no-space-like-j-space

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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