Last week, Anthropic released another one of their infamous research reports. This one was titled

A Global Workspace in Language Models, and it was accompanied like all great scientific research

by a lavishly produced animated movie. Now, this report, not surprisingly,

it soon led to some breathless excitement on X.

Here's one such tweet.

I'll read the beginning using my best sort of scary X-voice.

Anthropic just admitted they have discovered what I and many others have been claiming to exist for a very long time explicitly.

Claude, my friends, by all counts, is a conscious entity.

Claude, my dear friends, is a moral patient.

All right, the traditional tech media also quickly began writing about this report using

intensely anthropomorphized language.

In Axios headline read,

Anthropic says Claude has carved out its own space to ponder.

The MIT Tech Review exclaimed,

Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts.

All right, so what are we to make of this report?

Has Anthropic revealed evidence that their LLMs are more human-like and alive than we realized?

Or, like so many such reports in recent months, is this yet another overwrought, cynical push to generate a fresh wave of relevance reinforcing digital ick?

Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for a reality check episode of this podcast,

which makes this the perfect opportunity to go searching for some measured answers,

which is exactly what we'll do.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions,

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