I think it's not very helpful to just declare that such a model doesn't exist: there's a decent amount of evidence that LLMs do in fact form models of the world

I think it's not very helpful to just declare that such a model doesn't exist: there's a decent amount of evidence that LLMs do in fact form models of the world internally, and use them during inference. However, while these models are very large and complex, they aren't necessarily accurate and LLMs struggle with actually manipulating them at inference time, forming new models or adjusting existing ones is generally something they are quite bad at at those stages (which generally results in the 'high knowledge' which impresses people and is often confused with intelligence, while they're still fundamentally quite dumb despite having a huge depth of knowledge: I don't think it's something you can categorically say 'zero intelligence' - even relatively simpler and less capable systems can be said to have some intelligence, it's just in many aspects LLM intelligence is still worse than a good fraction of mammals)