# DeepThought: An Architecture for Autonomous Self-motivated Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08547/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 9 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02427/) (2023)
- [Augmenting Autotelic Agents with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12487/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to engage in credible dialogues with humans, taking into account the training data and the context of the conversation, has raised discussions about their ability to exhibit intrinsic motivations, agency, or even some degree of consciousness. We argue that the internal architecture of LLMs and their finite and volatile state cannot support any of these properties. By combining insights from complementary learning systems, global neuronal workspace, and attention schema theories, we propose to integrate LLMs and other deep learning systems into an architecture for cognitive language agents able to exhibit properties akin to agency, self-motivation, even some features of meta-cognition.