Maybe they can, but they’re trained on conversation and stories (among other things) rather than simulations. These are more general than the log of a simulatio

Maybe they can, but they’re trained on conversation and stories (among other things) rather than simulations. These are more general than the log of a simulation run in how they use time. Stories can be chronological, but they can also fill in the details in any order using things like flashbacks. Or they can get really complicated with time travel stories. So it seems like to understand a story well, an LLM would need a more sophisticated notion of time, where there is a history and events are slotted in as they’re learned from the narrative, and sometimes the whole history gets reinterpreted based on new information. (Plot twist!) It would be fascinating if some mechanistic interpretability researcher figured out how they actually work with story time. Are there the rudiments of that kind of understanding yet?