[Nevermark]

An LLM has no explicit goals.

But simply by approximating human communication which often models goal oriented behavior, an LLM can have implicit goals. Which likely vary widely according to conversation context.

Implicit goals can be very effective. Nowhere in DNA is there any explicit goal to survive. However combinations of genes and markers selected for survivability create creatures with implicit goals to survive as tenacious as any explicit goals might be.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Yes, the short term behavior/output of the LLM could reflect an implicit goal, but I doubt it'd maintain any such goal for an extended period of time (long-term coherence of behavior is a known shortcoming), since there is random sampling being done, and no internal memory from word to word - it seems that any implicit goal will likely rapidly drift.

[Nevermark]

Agreed. They can’t accurately model our communication for very long. So any implicit motives are limited to that.

But their capabilities are improving rapidly in both kind and measure.