> How different are world models from LLMs?

Depends if you’re asking about real world models or synthetic AI world models.

One of them only exists in species with a long evolutionary history of survivorship (and death) over generations living in the world being modeled.

There’s a sense of “what it’s like to be” a thing. That’s still a big question mark in my mind, whether AI will ever have any sense of what it’s like to be human, any more than humans know what it’s like to be a bat or a dolphin.

You know what it’s like for the cool breeze to blow across your face on a nice day. You could try explaining that to a dolphin, assuming we can communicate one day, but they won’t know what it’s like from any amount of words. That seems like something in the area of neuralink or similar.