I am skeptical that this is true, for reasons explained in my comment thread with John_Maxwell below, but I admit it might very well be. Hopefully it is.
Update: Seems to probably be true enough in practice! Maybe in the limit pretrained LLMs would have dangerous levels of agency, and some model-whisperers think they might be situationally aware already iirc, but for the most part the answer is no, things are fine, pretrained models probably aren’t situationally aware or agentic. In retrospect I think doubt was warranted, but not as much doubt as I had—I should have agreed that probably things would be fine in practice.
Update: Seems to probably be true enough in practice! Maybe in the limit pretrained LLMs would have dangerous levels of agency, and some model-whisperers think they might be situationally aware already iirc, but for the most part the answer is no, things are fine, pretrained models probably aren’t situationally aware or agentic. In retrospect I think doubt was warranted, but not as much doubt as I had—I should have agreed that probably things would be fine in practice.