> LLMs couldn't possibly have a world model I'm not asserting that they "couldn't possibly". I'm asserting that they don't--as in, none of the LLMs we have tod

> LLMs couldn't possibly have a world model I'm not asserting that they "couldn't possibly". I'm asserting that they don't--as in, none of the LLMs we have today have a world model. Perhaps someone might invent a different something in the future that they call an "LLM" that does have a world model, but no such thing exists now. > that confidence is based on intuition, not on any empirical observations No, it's not based on either of those. It's based on the explicit descriptions of how existing LLMs work by the people who made them. Their descriptions make clear that LLMs are just confabulating text based on a given prompt and their training data. The LLM doesn't make any connection at all between the text and anything else. Contrast, for example, with Wolfram Alpha. If you give Wolfram Alpha the prompt "What is the distance from New York to Tokyo", it doesn't confabulate text based on that prompt and some corpus of training data. It first parses the text and infers that the correct response involves a lookup in its geographic database (note that you can skip this step by explicitly selecting the particular tool that does this); then it does the lookup; then it renders the response into text form and outputs it. That is what having a (rudimentary) world model looks like. LLMs do nothing of the sort.