[int_19h]

Just because they aren't "designed" to have them doesn't mean that they actually do not. Here's a GPT model trained on board game moves - from scratch, without knowing the rules of the game or anything else about it - ended up having an internal representation of the current state of the game board encoded in the layers. In other words, it's actually modelling the game to "just predict the next token", and this functionality emerged spontaneously from the training.

https://thegradient.pub/othello/

So then why do you believe that ChatGPT doesn't have a model of the outside world? There's no doubt that it's a vastly simpler model than a human would have, but if it exists, how is that not "something like a mind"?

[mr_toad]

It was trained to model the game. LLMs are trained to model language. Neither are trained to take over the world.

[int_19h]

It was not trained to model the game. It was trained to predict the next token based on a sequence of previous tokens, which it wasn't even told are moves in a game, much less how to parse them. And it came up with an internal model of the game based on that that's accurate enough to include the board state. You could say that it "understands" the game at that point, even though it wasn't specifically trained to do that.