There is in fact compelling evidence that language models can learn some world models. Here's a research paper on this and a blog post by the lead author summa

There is in fact compelling evidence that language models can learn some world models. Here's a research paper on this and a blog post by the lead author summarizing the results. Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 Do Large Language Models learn world models or just surface statistics? https://thegradient.pub/othello/ https://thegradient.pub/othello/ ----- An argument based on common sense can also be made: Any system that possesses a wide range of capabilities, most of which it was not specifically trained to perform, cannot possibly perform all these tasks so well solely by making probabilistic guesses. (Humans, too, were not directly shaped by natural and sexual selection to possess all of our cognitive capacities.)