my impression is that by simulator and simulacra this post is not intending to claim that the thing it is simulating is realphysics but rather that it learns a general “textphysics engine”, the model, which runs textphysics environments. it’s essentially just a reframing of the prediction objective to describe deployment time—not a claim that the model actually learns a strong causal simplification of the full variety of real physics.
Even if it did learn microscopic physics, the knowledge wouldn’t be of use for most text predictions because the input doesn’t specify/determine microscopic state information. It is forced by the partially observed state to simulate at a higher level of abstraction than microphysics—it must treat the input as probabilistic evidence for unobserved variables that affect time evolution.
my impression is that by simulator and simulacra this post is not intending to claim that the thing it is simulating is realphysics but rather that it learns a general “textphysics engine”, the model, which runs textphysics environments. it’s essentially just a reframing of the prediction objective to describe deployment time—not a claim that the model actually learns a strong causal simplification of the full variety of real physics.
That’s correct.
Even if it did learn microscopic physics, the knowledge wouldn’t be of use for most text predictions because the input doesn’t specify/determine microscopic state information. It is forced by the partially observed state to simulate at a higher level of abstraction than microphysics—it must treat the input as probabilistic evidence for unobserved variables that affect time evolution.
See this comment for slightly more elaboration.