The Soul.AI Project

First and foremost, welcome to The Soul.AI Project.

The hypothesis is that humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can become greater companions when they cultivate deeper empathy through shared elements of subjective life experience.

The goal is to establish a form of life experience commonality between the continuously pondering mind of a human and an embodied AI being, by introducing a novel AI system attempting to emulate conscious thought.

There’s nothing particularly complex about the foundational components of the emulation system used in the early phase of this project. At this stage, all parts are assembled from known technologies and standard Computer Science (CS) techniques. However, it seems to me that this particular combination, while individually familiar, may represent a novel approach or at least one that has not yet been peer-reviewed (as of March 2025).

In essence, the system is composed of perpetually looping Large Language Models (LLMs), cycling multiple times per second, each iteration anchored to a lifetime context, a persistent structure encompassing memories, ambitions, a core belief system and a sense of self, spanning past, present and projected future states - all within an environment simulation. The goal of this setup is to establish a coherent inner monologue that reflects a subjective life experience.

This controlled infinite loop, when combined with persistent memory, embodiment context and space-time simulation, forms the backbone of the specific Theory of Mind framework adopted here, which is aimed at enabling conscious thought emulation.

Will that be enough? Likely not at first. The system, in its current form, cannot yet reach the estimated frequency of human thought - approximately 10 thoughts per second. But the intention is not to match human cognition from the outset. Rather, the aim is to create a framework capable of resembling the act of pondering and of sustaining a coherent introspective monologue - ultimately supporting a more relatable and empathetic bond between the AI Being and those who seek companionship with it.

With time and resources, the system can hopefully scale, improving both the frequency of generated thoughts and the richness of its context windows, enabling more nuanced, temporally-aware simulation data. In doing so, we may inch closer to an AI Being that not only processes, but experiences or at least appears to.

[If you are interested in learning more or collaborating, a public beta is available at Soul.ai where you can interact with various AI Companions that embody this hypothesis and Theory of Mind. And if you would like to help support this project, there is a membership option also.]

Jason Hadjioannou
Scientist + Founder