Do Large Language Models Have Theory of Mind? A Benchmark Study

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Does GPT-4 really understand us? A benchmark study reveals AI’s surprising Theory of Mind abilities—and where the limits still lie.
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This article evaluates whether advanced language models like GPT-4 and Flan-PaLM demonstrate Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to reason about others’ beliefs, intentions, and emotions. While results show GPT-4 sometimes matches or even exceeds adult human performance on 6th-order ToM tasks, limitations remain: the benchmark is small, English-only, and excludes multimodal signals that shape real human cognition. Future research must expand across cultures, languages, and embodied interactions to truly test AI’s capacity for mind-like reasoning.