>They do not manipulate concepts. There is no representation of a concept for them to manipulate.

Yes, they do. And of course there is. And there's plenty of research on the matter.

>It may, however, turn out that in doing what they do, they are effectively manipulating concepts

There is no effectively here. Text is what goes in and what comes out, but it's by no means what they manipulate internally.

>Nevertheless "manipulating concepts is exactly what they do" seems almost willfully ignorant of how these systems work, unless you believe that "find the next most probable sequence of tokens of some length" is all there is to "manipulating concepts".

"Find the next probable token" is the goal, not the process. It is what models are tasked to do yes, but it says nothing about what they do internally to achieve it.

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PaulDavisThe1st an hour ago | parent [-]

please pass on a link to a solid research paper that supports the idea that to "find the next probable token", LLM's manipulate concepts ... just one will do.

	▲	famouswaffles a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Revealing emergent human-like conceptual representations from language prediction - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2512514122 LLMs have "mental" models: Latent world models in LLM network weights can be inferred from output layer tokens at inference - https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m30v33r Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task - https://openreview.net/forum?id=DeG07_TcZvT On the Biology of a Large Language Model - https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio... Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models - https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...