Claim LD01-SL-C17 (v1.0)

Linear probes on Llama-2-70B’s activations predicted the locations of world places with out-of-sample R² of 0.911 and the death years of historical figures with 0.835; the authors say these representations “do not constitute a dynamic causal world model in their own right.”

Provenance and status

Claim type: ESTIMATE (as printed: “ESTIMATE”)
Publication status: ELIGIBLE (QUALIFIED) (as printed: “ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER”)
Verification state: CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY (as printed: “CONTENT VERIFIED”; verified by: UNKNOWN)
Does not license: Evidence that models use these representations as a causal model of the world, which the authors “conjecture, but do not show”
Source (field 6, as printed): Gurnee & Tegmark, “Language Models Represent Space and Time,” ICLR 2024
Source type (field 7): PEER_REVIEWED_CONFERENCE_PAPER (as printed: “Peer-reviewed conference paper”)
Institutional position: Independent academic (MIT)
Maturity (claim evidence / publication maturity): EMERGING (as printed: “EMERGING”)
Recorded date: 2026-10-16
Currentness / correction: This is the current version. No correction or concern relation is recorded on its Sources.

Version

Pinned version v1.0 (entry LD01-SL-C17--v1.0) — this page never floats to newer evidence.

This pinned version is also the current version.

Versions:v1.0 · current

Pinned Sources (field 6, version-specific)

“Gurnee & Tegmark, “Language Models Represent Space and Time,” ICLR 2024” → SRC-SL-GURNEE-TEGMARK-ARXIV-2310-02207--v1.0 — Gurnee & Tegmark, “Language Models Represent Space and Time,” ICLR 2024; class PEER_REVIEWED_CONFERENCE_PAPER (explicit public provenance pin)

All 25 canonical Claim fields (raw values and normalized values)

#	Canonical field	Canonical value (verbatim)	Normalized (Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2)
1	CLAIM ID	LD01-SL-C17	—
2	PUBLIC-FACING CLAIM	Linear probes on Llama-2-70B’s activations predicted the locations of world places with out-of-sample R² of 0.911 and the death years of historical figures with 0.835; the authors say these representations “do not constitute a dynamic causal world model in their own right.”	—
3	CLAIM TYPE	ESTIMATE	base_types: ESTIMATE
4	RESEARCH STRAND	B — Evidence that could tell the accounts apart	—
5	MATURITY	EMERGING	states: EMERGING
6	SOURCE	Gurnee & Tegmark, “Language Models Represent Space and Time,” ICLR 2024	source_ids: SRC-SL-GURNEE-TEGMARK-ARXIV-2310-02207
7	SOURCE TYPE	Peer-reviewed conference paper	classes: PEER_REVIEWED_CONFERENCE_PAPER
8	INSTITUTIONAL POSITION	Independent academic (MIT)	—
9	SCOPE	English-language entity datasets (places, people, works, headlines); Llama-2 and Pythia models	—
10	DESIGN	Linear and nonlinear probing of activations; neuron ablations	—
11	SAMPLE / DATASET	Six datasets of places and dated entities	—
12	MODEL / TOOL / VERSION	Llama-2 (7B, 13B, 70B) and Pythia models	—
13	COMPARATOR	Nonlinear probes; held-out blocks of data	—
14	MAIN RESULT	Out-of-sample R² for Llama-2-70B with a linear probe: world 0.911, US 0.864, New York City 0.359, historical figures 0.835, entertainment 0.885, headlines 0.746; nonlinear probes add little	—
15	INFERENTIAL TARGET	Whether language models hold structured representations that reflect the world, rather than only superficial statistics	—
16	DOES NOT LICENSE	Evidence that models use these representations as a causal model of the world, which the authors “conjecture, but do not show”	—
17	VERIFICATION STATE	CONTENT VERIFIED	state: CONTENT_VERIFIED_PRIMARY · verified_by: UNKNOWN
18	LIMITATIONS	Read in arXiv version 3 (4 March 2024); a probe can decode information a model does not use; held-out-block tests raise errors, which the authors read as weak evidence that probes partly learn the mapping themselves	—
19	CONTRADICTORY / SUPPORTING SOURCES	LD01-SL-C16	—
20	GEOGRAPHY / LANGUAGE	Mostly English	—
21	DISTRIBUTIONAL LEDGER	Not analysed in this claim	—
22	R01 / FIELD-MAP LINKS	LD-01, T4, D3	—
23	WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS CLAIM?	Causal tests showing the models do or do not use these representations	—
24	PUBLICATION STATUS	ELIGIBLE WITH QUALIFIER	state: ELIGIBLE · qualifiers: QUALIFIED
25	RECORDED DATE	2026-10-16	—

Field 22 references resolved against Field Map v0.2: LD-01 (LIVING_DEBATE); T4 (TENSION); D3 (DOMAIN)

Cited by Living Debate versions

LD-01 v0.1

Research-of-record provenance

Materialized by sociolens-materializer 0.6.0 at 2026-09-28T20:00:00.000Z; normalization contract SocioLens — Claim Value Vocabulary v1.0.2 — Pre-Spike Materialization Contract (v1.0.2). Content seal SHA-256 63868f18b56e0967ce535b3d07fcaabf95fb8a5716d493ce87a7614710f6e2f3.

Repository-authored inputs (not Drive exports)

SocioLens claim — LD01-SL-C17 v1.0 (v1.0) — written in the SocioLens repository by Project Lead (Claude, AI) on 2026-10-16; no Drive identity exists. Authority: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and the Owner's choice in the SocioLens project chat on 16 October 2026 to build the LD-01 debate; a new Claim, first version, written from the project's LD-01 source notes, checked against full texts, official web pages or official abstracts. Block “ENTRY 17 — LD01-SL-C17” SHA-256 593b32f886c6ddccf1df1c737d850b2df217bc6eb75246c88c8ca943ffca7d59; fixture fixtures/authored/claims/LD01-SL-C17--v1.0.

Builder decisions (not Drive data)

VERSION = v1.0 — basis: Claim version taken from the repository-authored claim fixture version (SocioLens claim — LD01-SL-C17 v1.0); the first version of a new Claim of the LD-01 debate
CURRENT_POINTER = true — basis: repository-authored claim "SocioLens claim — LD01-SL-C17 v1.0" (Project Lead (Claude, AI), 2026-10-16); basis: AGENTS.md "Authority" (the Project Lead decides research content within the research-integrity rules) and the Owner's choice in the SocioLens project chat on 16 October 2026 to build the LD-01 debate; a new Claim, first version, written from the project's LD-01 source notes, checked against full texts, official web pages or official abstracts
FIELD_6_SOURCE_REFERENCE = SRC-SL-GURNEE-TEGMARK-ARXIV-2310-02207--v1.0 — basis: field 6 of ENTRY 17 — LD01-SL-C17 cites "Gurnee & Tegmark, “Language Models Represent Space and Time,” ICLR 2024"; the only field-6 segment of this ClaimVersion's repository-authored ledger block.
SOURCE_PROVENANCE_PIN = SRC-SL-GURNEE-TEGMARK-ARXIV-2310-02207--v1.0 — basis: explicit version-pinned public provenance of this ClaimVersion (Amendment v1.2 §6): the pinned field-6 Source record "Gurnee & Tegmark, “Language Models Represent Space and Time,” ICLR 2024".