[dTal]

Insofar as this is a philosophically meaningful assertion, it isn't true. LLMs live in a universe of words, it is true; within that universe, they absolutely have world models, which encode the relationships between concepts encoded by words. It's not "reality", but neither are the conceptual webs stored in human brains. Everything is mediated through senses. There's no qualitative difference between an input stream of abstract symbols, and one of pictures and sounds. Unless you think Helen Keller lacked a concept of true and false?

[gibsonf1]

They don't have world models, they have word models. A very big difference indeed!

[warkdarrior]

Would you say that blind-deaf-paralyzed people do not have world models either, since they can only experience the world through words?

[gibsonf1]

Well, if they have hearing, they can build a world model based on that sensation. So when someone talks about the fall, they can remember the sound of leaves hitting other leaves when they fall. The senses give us measurement data on reality that we use to then model reality. We humans then can create concepts about that experience, and then ultimately communicate with other using common words to communication that conceptual understanding. Word data alone is just word data with no meaning. This is why when I look at a paragraph in Russian, it has no meaning for me. (As I don't understand Russian)