CTM-AI: A Blueprint for General AI Inspired by a Model of Consciousness
Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, L. Blum, M. Blum, Paul Pu Liang
arXiv.org April 30, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.04097 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Proposes that CTM-AI, a system integrating the Conscious Turing Machine with foundation models, offers a blueprint for general AI. Reports that CTM-AI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on MUStARD (72.28) and UR-FUNNY (72.13), outperforming other frameworks, and shows over 10-point improvements on StableToolBench and WebArena-Lite. |
Abstract
Despite remarkable advances, today's AI systems remain narrow in scope, falling short of the flexible, adaptive, and multisensory intelligence that characterizes human capabilities. This gap has fueled longstanding debates about whether AI might one day achieve human-like generality or even consciousness, and whether theories of consciousness can inspire new architectures for AI. This paper presents an early blueprint for implementing a general AI system, CTM-AI, combining the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), a formal machine model of consciousness, with today's foundation models. CTM-AI contains an enormous number of powerful processors ranging from specialized experts (e.g., vision-language models and APIs) to unspecialized general-purpose learners poised to develop their own expertise. Crucially, for whatever problem must be dealt with, information from many processors is selected, integrated, and exchanged appropriately to solve the task. CTM-AI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on MUStARD (72.28) and UR-FUNNY (72.13), outperforming multimodal and multi-agent frameworks. On tool-using and agentic tasks, CTM-AI achieves 10+ points of improvement on StableToolBench and WebArena-Lite. Overall, CTM-AI offers a principled, testable blueprint for general AI inspired by a model of consciousness.