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Comment by wnoise | Hacker News Reader

Those aren't part of the model though. The model is just a representation of the world. An abstract representation can be useful, but so can more concrete ones. A representation that is amenable to logical reasoning is also useful, but the reasoning isn't part of the model.

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Then why call it a world model? It's a "data" model and not actually a "world" model. World models would need to have logical relationships between the entities being modeled which would include non-trivial logical relations, R(x,y), and properties, P(x). Current language models do not have such representations and fail miserably on any task that is not explicitly included in the training set (sudoku being an obvious example).

>World models would need to have logical relationships between the entities being

No they wouldn't. There is no evidence, basically none whatsoever that logical can model reality or that general "perfect logical reasoning" is a thing that actually exists in the real world in real world relationships. None.

No animal we've observed does it. Humans certainly don't do it. The only realm this idea actually seems to work is Fiction. and this was not like for a lack of trying. Some of the greatest minds worked on this for decades and some people still don't seem to get it. Logic doesn't scale. It breaks at real world relationships.

We were using logic for image, speech, language synthesis and just had to throw it away once something that actually worked came about.

If logic was so great at modeling the world, we wouldn't be using LLMs like GPT-4 , we'd be using Cyc, the system with decades of a headstart.

Logic systems are that guy in the stands yelling that he could've made the shot, while he's not even on the field.

>included in the training set (sudoku being an obvious example)

LLMs can play sudoku just fine. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08291

Code is logic. LLMs are expressed with logical syntax. I recommend meditating on this fact for some time and trying to understand its implications instead of buying into the hype about LLMs being world models.

Logic is part of the real world. Logic is not the real world. It does not scale to all of reality. This is obvious. anything without clear definitions and unambiguous axioms and it falls apart. You don't have to take my word for it.

LLMs aren't world models. They're linguistic models. However, with the right training database, it turns out that a good parsimonious linguistic model will have a (multiple, probably) world model as a subset, as it is so much better at compressing/predicting the textual stream.

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