Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by abeppu on Thursday February 09, 2023 @06:29PM (#34733264)

Maybe the participant "knows" something about the Thai language? But that's different from knowing anything about the things being discussed. The jumping off point for this, which motivated a question about what it is to know, was the comment:

> What this article is not showing (but either irresponsibly or naively suggests) is that the LLM knows what a bag is, what a person is, what popcorn and chocolate are, and can then put itself in the shoes of someone experiencing this situation, and finally communicate its own theory of what is going on in that person's mind. That is just not in evidence.

Knowing something about the patterns of word order in Thai is not the same as knowing about the world being discussed in Thai.

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Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by spacemadness on Thursday February 09, 2023 @06:47PM (#34733438)

Language doesn’t come first for humans. Experiencing the world does. Languages then become symbols to communicate experiencing the world through our senses and emotional/mental states. I’m not sure why people get hung up on language models not being the same thing when they start and end with language.

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Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by seba_dos1 on Friday February 10, 2023 @10:27AM (#34740864)

Indeed. Give a model some kind of autonomous sensors, make it stateful with memory and continuous retraining, make it possible for it to act and learn from its actions, maybe even model some kind of hormonal influence etc. and I'm pretty sure that at some point an actual Theory of Mind will actually emerge and we'll be debating what kind of legal rights such a model should possess. We're pretty clearly not at that point yet.

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