From task structures to world models: What do LLMs know?

Abstract

In what sense does a large language model have knowledge? The answer to this question extends beyond the capabilities of a particular AI system, and challenges our assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. We answer by granting LLMs "instrumental knowledge"; knowledge defined by a certain set of abilities. We then ask how such knowledge is related to the more ordinary, "worldly" knowledge exhibited by human agents, and explore this in terms of the degree to which instrumental knowledge can be said to incorporate the structured world models of cognitive science. We discuss ways LLMs could recover degrees of worldly knowledge, and suggest such recovery will be governed by an implicit, resource-rational tradeoff between world models and task demands.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Transforming Agency. On the mode of existence of Large Language Models
• Chatting with Bots: AI, Speech Acts, and the Edge of Assertion
• What Do Large Language Models Know? Tacit Knowledge as a Potential Causal-Explanatory Structure
• Can structural correspondences ground real world representational content in Large Language Models?
• How LLMs Might Think