[aoeusnth1]

When I read your reply, I’m also modeling language. Tokens are just the discretization of the model’s eyes and ears. My brain does a huge amount of work to represent what’s happening in the world based on discrete information received from the outside world, just like language models do.

[tootie]

Sure but you've also probably formed a model of who I am and what I'm thinking and formulated a response that isn't just grammatical and relevant but designed to provoke an outcome.

[aoeusnth1]

We're discussing whether they are models or not, not whether they have goals and agency. A language model does form a model of who you are and what you're thinking, because language is causally connected to those aspects of the generating distribution and modeling those aspects reduces cross-entropy.

RL provides the goals and agency. Pretraining provides the model.