[retsibsi]

> do you think that there is any reason to believe there is any such thing as cosmetic vs foundational

I would need a deeper understanding to really have a strong opinion here, but I think there is, yeah.

Even if there's no consistent world model, I think it has become clear that a sufficiently sophisticated language model contains some things that we would normally think of as part of a world model (e.g. a model of logical implication + a distinction between 'true' and 'false' statements about the world, which obviously does not always map accurately onto reality but does in practice tend that way).

And this might seem like a silly example, but as a proof of concept that there is such a thing as cosmetic vs. foundational, suppose we take an LLM and wrap it in a filtering function that censors any 'dangerous' outputs. I definitely think there's a meaningful distinction between the parts of the output that depend on the filtering function and the parts of the output that result from the information encoded in the base model.