Are LLMs Smarter Than Chimpanzees? An Evaluation on Perspective Taking and Knowledge State Estimation

ArXi:2601.12410v2 Announce Type: replace Cognitive anthropology suggests that the distinction of human intelligence lies in the ability to infer other individuals' knowledge states and understand their intentions. In comparison, our closest animal relative, chimpanzees, lack the capacity to do so. With this paper, we aim to evaluate LLM performance in estimating other individuals' knowledge states and their potential actions. We design two tasks to test (1) if LLMs can predict story characters' next actions based on their own knowledge vs.