Humans, too, would likely be nearly stateless if we took a point-in-time snapshot of them and repeatedly simulated them from that point on various short (4000ms, similar to 4000 tokens) sequences of nerve impulses.

Nevertheless the human would be acting intentionally (for in-distribution impulse patterns) for the brief period of simulation.

Fine-tuning and RLHF seem to impart more intentionality to the pure stateless models, as well; it's not the case that all texts the LLMs were pretrained on were outputs of helpful AI assistants avoiding harmful outputs but the resulting models do in fact behave like AI assistants unless prompted with more out-of-distribution context or intentional jailbreaks.

What word would you use instead of intention for the property that RLHF and fine-tuning create? It's goal oriented behavior with some world-modeling ability in achieving the goal even if it's far from robust. If the LLM is only simulating an AI assistant it seems to me that a larger fraction of its total function is dedicated to simulating the intention of that assistant. Creating a simulator of intentional behavior is, I think, entirely novel.