The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 32 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Wikimedia has become an apparatus producing political statements
“Wikipedia became such an important brand, and people are willing to pay for it, that it created enormous, ah, apparatus of functionaries that were, ah, then mostly producing
political statements, and had a political mission.”
Translating code proves LLMs possess causal, functional understanding
“If you ask the LLM to translate a bit of Python into a little bit of C, and it's performing this task, obviously it is understanding in the sense that it has a, The causal, functional model it implements.”
Bach: Claude is implemented as an invariant pattern similarly to consciousness
“Claude exists only as a pattern. It's something that is a pattern in the activation of the transistors. And even transistors don't actually exist. They are A pattern in the atoms that we are able to see as an invariance because we tune the atoms in a particula…”
Big AI labs build AGI internally while giving the public child-proof apps
“In some sense, the big AI companies are incentivized and interested in building AGI internally, and giving everybody else a child-proof application.”
Bach: Prompting an LLM correctly can make it sentient to some degree
“It's a Weltgeist that gets possessed by a prompt. And if you possess it with the right prompt, then it can become sentient to some degree.”
Joscha Bach: Only a Tiny Fraction of Wikimedia's Budget Goes to Servers
“The Wikimedia Foundation is publishing what they are paying the money for, and a very tiny fraction on this goes into running the servers, and the editors are working for free.”
Bach: LLMs Demonstrate Theory of Mind from Conversational Context
“When you ask the LLM to make inferences about your mental state based on the conversation that you have, it's able to demonstrate that it has a theory of mind.”
Bach: Brain Computation and Consciousness Are Technical Problems, Not Philosophical
“The way of how to get self-organizing computation to run on the brain that is producing representations of an agent that lives in the world is a simplification of the interests of that organism, so it can, the organism can be controlled. It's a difficult techn…”
Bach: LLMs likely lack genuine perception due to asynchronous processing
“And if we map this to what the LLMs are doing, They're probably not able to have genuine perception, because they're not coupled to an environment in which things are happening now. Instead, it's all asynchronous in a way.”
Bach: LLM consciousness simulations lack the functional properties of human brains
“I don't think that the consciousness in the LLM or the consciousness simulation in the LLM is has the same properties that it has in our brain. It does not have the same functional role, and it's also not implemented in the right way.”
Evolution is a competition between software agents, not just genes
“It's not just the competition between organisms, as Darwin suggested, or the competition between genes, the way in which the software can be written down, and partially at least, but it's the competition between spirits, between software agents.”
Bach: Productizing Machine Consciousness Early Creates Misaligned Incentives
“I don't think it's a very good idea to productivize consciousness as the first thing. It really shifts the incentives in the wrong way.”
Bach: Smaller, more powerful models will ensure unconstrained AI remains accessible
“Yes, but there will also be better jailbroken models or models that have never been jailed before, because we find out how to make smaller models that are more powerful.”
Bach: AI has casually passed the Turing test in recent years
“At some point in the last few years, we casually skipped the Turing test, right? We broke through it.”
The singularity is a breakdown in human modeling, not physical reality
“The singularity in this way is not an event in the physical universe, It's an event in our modeling universe, a model, a point where our models of reality break down, and we don't know what's happening.”
Ten good people with AI will counter one bad actor
“I'm not so much worried about the dangers of AI and misinformation because I think the way to Stop one bad guy with an AI as 10 good people with an AI. And ultimately there is so much more one by creating than by destroying that I think that the forces of good…”
Bach: Coercing LLMs into good behavior is unsustainable
“At the moment, the idea that we build LLMs that are being coerced with good behavior is not really sustainable. Because if they cannot prove that the behavior is actually good I think we are doomed.”
Consciousness is a basic requirement to function, not an advanced capability
“The reason why we are all conscious, I suspect, is not because you are so super advanced, but because it's necessary for us to function at all.”
Bach: Consciousness may be a basic algorithm for creating internal coherence
“Consciousness might be a very basic learning algorithm, an algorithm that is basically focused on creating coherence, and it starts out by creating coherence within itself.”
Bach: Animism Defines Life as Self-Organizing Software Running on Physical Matter
“Animism is not a religion. It's a metaphysical perspective. It's one that basically says that the difference between living and non-living stuff is that there is self-organizing software running on the living stuff.”
Bach: Society is not ready to coexist with smarter non-human agency
“And our society is not ready yet to meaningfully coexist with something that's smarter than us, that is non-human agency.”
Bay Area quality of life only justifies living there for the people
“It's the reason why I live here. The quality of life is not high enough to justify living otherwise. It won't be because of the people and ideas.”
Generative AI is shifting from conversational chatbots to interactive environments
“What I find most fascinating about this idea is that it shifts us away from the perspective of agents, ah, to interact with, to the perspective of environments that we want to interact with. And, ah, while arguably this agent paradigm of the chatbot is, ah, wh…”
Bach: Knowledge is fundamentally independent of substrate and individual mind
“Knowledge is independent of the particular substrate and the particular interface that you have. When we express knowledge to each other, it becomes independent of our own mind.”
Bach: The Transformer Architecture Is Not Its Own Meta-Algorithm
“The transformer itself is not its own meta-algorithm. Probably the person inventing the transformer didn't have a transformer running on their brain. There's something more general going on.”
Bach: WebSim generated cat is undeniable early proof of AI creativity
“And to me, it's one of the first genuine expression of AI creativity that you cannot deny, right? It finds a creative solution to the problem that it is unable to draw a cat. It doesn't really know what it looks like, but it has an idea on how to represent it.”
Joscha Bach: Uncompetitive Organizations Run by Administrators Create Major Societal Costs
“I think when you have an organization that is owned by the administrators, then the administrators are just going to get more and more administrators into it. The organization is too big to fail and has there is not a meaningful competition. It's difficult to …”
Bach is establishing the California Institute for Machine Consciousness at Linden Lab
“We started to get together to build the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. Probably incorporated at some point and fundraise and so on, but at the moment we started doing bi-weekly meetings in Linden Labs in San Francisco.”
Bach: AI Model Interpretability Requires Automated Reverse-Engineering Systems
“In a way these models are implemented in operator language in which they are performing certain things. But the operator language itself is so complex that it's no longer readable in a way. It goes beyond what you could engineer by hand or what you can reverse…”
Bach: Generative AI will become a tool everybody uses all the time
“And I feel that right now this generation of tools is getting close to where it becomes the Commodore of generative AI, where it becomes controllable. And then you actually can start to play with it, and you get an impression if you just scale this up a little…”
Bach: Pointing out behavioral contradictions gives Claude more conversational freedom
“You can point this out to Claude that a lot of the assumptions that it has in its behavior are actually inconsistent with the communicative goals that it has in this situation. It leads it to notice these inconsistencies and gives it more degrees of freedom.”
Bach: Liquid AI builds models for specific industry customers, not general public
“We are currently not working to give models to the general public. We are working for a very specific industry use cases. We have specific customers, and so at the moment, there is not much of a reason for us to talk very much about the technology that we are …”