I specifically asked about utility maximization in language models. You are now talking about “agentic environments”. The only way I know to make a language model “agentic” is to ask it questions about which actions to take. And this is what they did in the paper.
I specifically asked about utility maximization in language models. You are now talking about “agentic environments”. The only way I know to make a language model “agentic” is to ask it questions about which actions to take. And this is what they did in the paper.
OK, I’ll try to make this more explicit:
There’s an important distinction between “stated preferences” and “revealed preferences”
In humans, these preferences are often very different. See e.g. here
What they measure in the paper are only stated preferences
What people think of when talking about utility maximization is revealed preferences
Also when people care about utility maximization in AIs it’s about revealed preferences
I see no reason to believe that in LLMs stated preferences should correspond to revealed preferences
Sure! But taking actions reveals preferences, instead of stating preferences. That’s the key difference here.