Evidence is mounting that LLMs may be building world models, ie true understanding. > A pretty hot question right now is whether LLMs are just bundles of stati

Evidence is mounting that LLMs may be building world models, ie true understanding. > A pretty hot question right now is whether LLMs are just bundles of statistical correlations or have some real understanding and computation! This gives suggestive evidence that simple objectives to predict the next token can create rich emergent structure (at least in the toy setting of Othello). Rather than just learning surface level statistics about the distribution of moves, it learned to model the underlying process that generated that data. In my opinion, it's already pretty obvious that transformers can do something more than statistical correlations and pattern matching, see eg induction heads, but it's great to have clearer evidence of fully-fledged world models! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nmxzr2zsjNtjaHh7x/actually-othello-gpt-has-a-linear-emergent-world https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nmxzr2zsjNtjaHh7x/actually-o...