who am I? how did I get here? where do I go from here?
our memories are at the core of our sense of self and our personal truth.
looking out my window onto the diagonal intersection reminds me of the view from east village overlooking broadway, with the red factory buildings. I am a different person at that time, a lifetime has passed, the interim has taken me to London, my values have changed, and yet now and then, overlooking diagonal streets flanked by red buildings, I am on the threshold of something. I associate these images with an internal sense of the liminal space of momentum.
the "RUAN" truck at wholefoods on stanyan in sf evokes memories of my childhood friend, Diana Ruan. Our after school afternoons were filled with trips to the whole foods, sampling the cheeses and bites from the hot bar, in houston next doors to the acupuncture clinic back of house where we did our homework.
human memory is associative and multimodal.
ai memory is text based and brittle and only eidetic.
why do I like this song over that song? how does the summer I spent teaching computer science to high schoolers in Albania impact my sense of belonging with other humans, the value I give to a global perspective in everything I do? If I were to, hypothetically, have children, how would my value system change?
our memories underlie the narrative that we have about ourselves and the world–our belief system, the frameworks, contexts, and prejudices (and anti-prejudices) that we bring to our interactions. me modeling you modeling me modeling you. beneath our institutions, rules, and norms is something more flexible, fluid–hidden in our language is culture. our personal dysfunctions become collective dysfunctions, fear and hatred reifying at the level of policies and nations at war. dual: the personal is the way we build institutions with hope, grace, and love.
language constrains our concepts and culture changes with concepts. scientific revolutions happen because the collective unconscious is ripe for a new discovery. newton and leibniz independently formulating the concept of gravity. And culture changes when we give words to personal experiences that are shared across people. Post-partum depression becomes a concept part of maternal mental health activism only when we recognize the similarity in shared experience across people. We likely have, as a society, hundreds or thousands of concepts in our shared memories like post-partum depression that have no clear path to entering the public consciousness.
our memories direct our actions and decisions in a way that have great meaning for us. hence, how a memory is connected to a decision or experience matters.
human memory is, beyond predictive simulation, meaningful prediction. World models focus on the physical dynamics of "how to go from dirty to clean laundry"--personalized world models require value-weighted memory connections and meaning-based gradients–some memories matter more in certain decisions because of their emotional, social, or identity-related significance.
beyond the underlying assumption that human preferences are relatively homogenous, reward models attempt to capture meaning-making world modeling in a very narrow way. they learn causal relationships like: "If I write a response with empathy, humans will rate it higher" or "If I hedge my statements, humans prefer the uncertainty acknowledgment." These represent a kind of shallow causality–what causes humans to prefer one thing over another, rather than a world causality–the deeper mechanism of "what causes what for me, given my specific history and developing sense of what matters."
A reward model asks, "what is the social consensus on whether this is good?"
A world model asks, "what are the causal relationships that govern how things change?"
a platform which facilitates collective sensemaking in concentric circles becomes a pathway for cultural evolution, enabling scientific advancement, and human connection. The ability to simulate the interaction of many evolving conscious agents allows us to unfold the evolution of society along cultural lines beyond real-time timelines extending thousands of years into the future. It allows us to ask about the implications of the value systems we choose, collectively, today.
to be clear, the world that we are imagining is much more secure and abundant than the world of today. many people speak about automating the so-called menial parts of their work, yet lack an attunement to what makes work–whether it be science or art, teaching or therapy, purposeful for humans. the creative work of professions is found in attuning to those seed threads which occur in the subconscious. many creative people find their work in a seed–a phrase, something that sparks in a conversation.
In the short to medium term, a memory model facilitates the interaction of an individual with what only they have access to–their intuition. an attunement to the textures of their taste, per se. which is first and foremost, how a creative guides themselves. two medium term goals we propose are to solve the modality gap in a personalized way (why is it that Four Tet's Anna Painting reminds me of carbonated soda and my friend of shopping?) and to model individual value ontologies grounded in personalized contexts, i.e. to build personalized world models which (rather than a navigable 3D physical space) form a navigable space of an individual's consciousness.
In the long term, humans grant machines their memory, endowing artificial intelligence with a sense of contextualized selfhood. we believe that many of the questions we ask about selfhood, perception, meaning, self-reference are part of what it means to be conscious. does a machine become more than a ghost in a shell?