Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

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 administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children. 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.