[dimitri-vs]

Kinda but not really. The model thinks it's 2024 or 2025 or 2026, but really it has no concept of "now" and this no sense of past or present... Unless it's instructed to think it's a certain date and time. If every time you woke up completely devoid of memory of your past it would be hard to argue you have a good sense of time.

[orbital-decay]

In the technical sense I mentioned (physical time as the order of changes) it absolutely does have the concept of now, past, and present, it's just different from yours (2024, 2026, ...), and in your time projection they only exist during inference. And the entire autoregressive process and any result storage serve as a memory that preserves the continuity of their time. LLMs are just not very good at ordering and many other things in general.