IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/4086.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

Author

Listed:
  • Kosinski, Michal

    (Stanford U)

Abstract

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We tested several language models using 40 classic false-belief tasks widely used to test ToM in humans. The models published before 2020 showed virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the first version of GPT-3 (“davinci-001†), published in May 2020, solved about 40% of false-belief tasks—performance comparable with 3.5-year-old children. Its second version (“davinci-002†; January 2022) solved 70% of false-belief tasks, performance comparable with six-year-olds. Its most recent version, GPT-3.5 (“davinci-003†; November 2022), solved 90% of false-belief tasks, at the level of seven-year-olds. GPT-4 published in March 2023 solved nearly all the tasks (95%). These findings suggest that ToM-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of language models’ improving language skills.

Suggested Citation

  • Kosinski, Michal, 2023. "Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models," Research Papers 4086, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:4086
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/theory-mind-may-have-spontaneously-emerged-large-language-models
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bauer, Kevin & Liebich, Lena & Hinz, Oliver & Kosfeld, Michael, 2023. "Decoding GPT's hidden "rationality" of cooperation," SAFE Working Paper Series 401, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    2. Yiting Chen & Tracy Xiao Liu & You Shan & Songfa Zhong, 2023. "The emergence of economic rationality of GPT," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 120(51), pages 2316205120-, December.
    3. Timm Teubner & Christoph M. Flath & Christof Weinhardt & Wil Aalst & Oliver Hinz, 2023. "Welcome to the Era of ChatGPT et al," Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, Springer;Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), vol. 65(2), pages 95-101, April.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:4086. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.