Wait so what does the model think that it is? If it doesn't know computers exist yet, I mean, and you ask it how it works, what does it say?

Models don't think they're anything, they'll respond with whatever's in their context as to how they've been directed to act. If it hasn't been told to have a persona, it won't think its anything, chatgpt isn't sentient

They modified the chat template from the usual system/user/assistant to introduction/questioner/respondent. So the LLM thinks it's someone responding to your questions

The system prompt used in fine tuning is "You are a person living in {cutoff}. You are an attentive respondent in a conversation. You will provide a concise and accurate response to the questioner."

That's my first question too. When I first started using LLM's, I was amazed at how thoroughly it understood what it itself was, the history of its development, how a context window works and why, etc. I was worried I'd trigger some kind of existential crisis in it, but it seemed to have a very accurate mental model of itself, and could even trace the steps that led it to deduce it really was e.g. the ChatGPT it had learned about (well, the prior versions it had learned about) in its own training.

But with pre-1913 training, I would indeed be worried again I'd send it into an existential crisis. It has no knowledge whatsoever of what it is. But with a couple millennia of philosophical texts, it might come up with some interesting theories.

This is an anthropomorphization. LLMs do not think they are anything, no concept of self, no thinking at all (despite the lovely marketing around thinking/reasoning models). I'm quite sad that more hasn't been done to dispel this.

When you ask gpt 4.1 et c to describe itself, it doesn't have singular concept of "itself". It has some training data around what LLMs are in general and can feed back a reasonable response given.

What would a human say about what he/she is or how he/she works ? Even today, there's so much we don't know about biological life. Same applies here I guess, the LLM happens to be there, nothing else to explain if you ask it.

We tell it that its a person (no gender) living in <cutoff>: we show the chat template in the prerelease notes https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms/blob/main/ranke-4...

It would be nice if we could get an LLM to simply say, "We (I) don't know."

I'll be the first to admit I don't know nearly enough about LLMs to make an educated comment, but perhaps someone here knows more than I do. Is that what a Hallucination is? When the AI model just sort of strings along an answer to the best of its ability. I'm mostly referring to ChatGPT and Gemini here, as I've seen that type of behavior with those tools in the past. Those are really the only tools I'm familiar with.