> The interviewer had an idea that he took for granted: that to understand language you have to have a model of the world. LLMs seem to understand language therefore they've trained a model of the world. Sutton rejected the premise immediately. He might be right in being skeptical here.

That's the basic success of LLMs. They don't have much of a model of the world, and they still work. "Attention is all you need". Good Old Fashioned AI was all about developing models, yet that was a dead end.

There's been some progress on representation in an unexpected area. Try Perchance's AI character chat. It seems to be an ordinary chatbot. But at any point in the conversation, you can ask it to generate a picture, which it does using a Stable Diffusion type system. You can generate several pictures, and pick the one you like best. Then let the LLM continue the conversation continue from there.

It works from a character sheet, which it will create if asked. It's possible to start from an image and get to a character sheet and a story. The back and forth between the visual and textural domains seems to help.

For storytelling, such system may need to generate the collateral materials needed for a stage or screen production - storyboards, scripts with stage directions, character summaries, artwork of sets, blocking (where everybody is positioned on stage), character sheets (poses and costumes) etc. Those are the modeling tools real productions use to keep a work created by many people on track. Those are a form of world model for storytelling.

I've been amazed at how good the results I can get from this thing are. You have to coax it a bit. It tends to stay stuck in a scene unless you push the plot forward. But give it a hint of what happens next and it will run with it.

[1]https://perchance.org/ai-character-chat