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An LLM, as the name implies, only has access to words. It can only model things about those words and the relationships between them. It never has access to the actual things the words represent.

So it absolutely has experiential knowledge of words but not of the actual things.

(You can absolutely train models on other inputs. I have no objections to those not being stochastic parrots)

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Yes but I meant that for instance, how is experience stored in the humans? It is encoded as data in the brain and or rest of body. So I think its possible even a pure textual LLM may have imbibed experiential data somehow during its training.

But if your claim is at least that you are fine with thinking AI's that also include physical training are not stochastic parrots, then thats good enough for me.

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