In that sentence you are implying that you have the "ability to model ... another". An LLM cannot do that, it can't have an internal model that is consistent beyond its conversational scope. Its not meant to. Its a statistics guesser, its probabilistic, holds no model, and its anthropomorphised by our brains because the output is incredibly realistic not because it actually has that ability
The ability to mimic the replies of someone with that ability, is the same of Mary being able to describe all the qualities of Red. She still cannot see red, despite her ability to pass any question in relation to its characteristics.
> I don't think we have any strong evidence on whether LLMs have world-models one way or another
They simply cannot by their architecture. Its a statistical language sampler, anything beyond the scope of that fails. Local coherance is why they pick the next right token not because they can actually model anything.
> I think those are functionally the same sentence
Functionally and literally are not the same thing though. Its why we can run studies as to why some people might say Bob and Alice (putting the man first) or Alice and Bob (alphabetical naming) and what human societies and biases affect the order we put them on.
You could not run that study on an LLM because you will find that statistically speaking the ordering will be almost identical to the training data. If the training data overwhelmingly puts male names first or whether the training data orders list alphabetically you will see that reproduced on the output of the llm because Bob and Alice are not people, they are statistical probably letters in order.
LLM seem to trigger borderline mysticism in people who are otherwise insanely smart, but the kind of "we cant know its internal mind" sounds like reading tea leaves, or horoscopes by people with enough Phds to have their number retired on their university like Michael Jordan.
