[dauhak]

ToM is about being able to model the internal beliefs/desires etc of another person as being entirely distinct from yours. You're basically bringing up a particular implementation of long-term memory as a necessary component of it, which I've never once seen? If someone has severe memory issues, they could forget who Steve is every few minutes, but still be able to look at Steve doing something and model what Steve must want and believe given his actions

I don't think we have any strong evidence on whether LLMs have world-models one way or another - it feels like a bit of a fuzzy concept and I'm not sure what experiments you'd try here.

I disagree with your last point, I think those are functionally the same sentence

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> ToM is about being able to model the internal beliefs/desires etc of another person as being entirely distinct from yours.

In that sentence you are implying that you have the "ability to model ... another". An LLM cannot do that, it can't have an internal model that is consistent beyond its conversational scope. Its not meant to. Its a statistics guesser, its probabilistic, holds no model, and its anthropomorphised by our brains because the output is incredibly realistic not because it actually has that ability

The ability to mimic the replies of someone with that ability, is the same of Mary being able to describe all the qualities of Red. She still cannot see red, despite her ability to pass any question in relation to its characteristics.

> I don't think we have any strong evidence on whether LLMs have world-models one way or another

They simply cannot by their architecture. Its a statistical language sampler, anything beyond the scope of that fails. Local coherance is why they pick the next right token not because they can actually model anything.

> I think those are functionally the same sentence

Functionally and literally are not the same thing though. Its why we can run studies as to why some people might say Bob and Alice (putting the man first) or Alice and Bob (alphabetical naming) and what human societies and biases affect the order we put them on.

You could not run that study on an LLM because you will find that statistically speaking the ordering will be almost identical to the training data. If the training data overwhelmingly puts male names first or whether the training data orders list alphabetically you will see that reproduced on the output of the llm because Bob and Alice are not people, they are statistical probably letters in order.

LLM seem to trigger borderline mysticism in people who are otherwise insanely smart, but the kind of "we cant know its internal mind" sounds like reading tea leaves, or horoscopes by people with enough Phds to have their number retired on their university like Michael Jordan.

[dauhak]

Do you work in ML research on LLMs? I do, and I don't understand why people are so unbelievable confident they understand how AI and human brains work such that they can definitely tell what functions of the brain LLMs can also perform. Like, you seem to know more than leading neuroscientists, ML researchers, and philosophers, so maybe you should consider a career change. You should maybe also look into the field of mechanistic interpretability, where lots of research has been done on internal representations these models form - it turns out, to predict text really really well, building an internal model of the underlying distribution works really well

If you can rigorously state what "having a world model" consists of and what - exactly - about a transformer architecture precludes it from having one I'd be all ears. As would the academic community, it'd be a groundbreaking paper.