It’s not that LLMs have mental models. It’s that people have mental models of how various things work. For example, many people have a wrong mental model of ho

It’s not that LLMs have mental models. It’s that people have mental models of how various things work. For example, many people have a wrong mental model of how an oven works. They think that if they set the oven for 350 F it heats with more energy than if they set the oven for 150 F. In reality it heats at exactly the same power, but it turns off when the internal temperature reaches the set rate. For most use cases it does not matter that your mental model does not match how the oven works. But there are some not he cases where it does matter. The article shares a mental model of how LLMs work that might help users use them better.