I do understand the difference between a simulator and what's being simulated. I still think they got it all wrong, that the simulator is better called a "writer," the simulated world is better called a "story," and the agent is a better called a "fictional character."

We know there's no deeper level to the simulation/game because we have the entire "game history" (the chat history) and we understand it in approximately same way that the LLM does. (That's what the LLM was trained to do, understand and respond to text the same way we do.) We know that the bot has no hidden state when it's not the bot's turn because of how the bot's API works.

So there's nowhere for a deeper simulation to live. It's as shallow as it looks.

More:

https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chats-are-turn-based-game...