Ask a human how many neurons they have. Hell, over history humans haven't even consistently understood that the brain is where cognition happens.

The models didn't exist when their training data was collected.

But... that's not really an excuse any more. Model vendors should understand now that the most natural thing in the world is for people to ask models directly about their own abilities and architecture.

I think models should have a final layer of fine-tuning or even system prompting to help them answer these kinds of questions in a useful way.

Does a monkey know that it is a monkey?

I think "yes" is the most likely answer here

animals have a lot more intelligence than they typically get attributed

Tool use, names, language, social structure and behavior, even drug use has been shown across many species

Okay, but the monkey doesn't know that it knows that it's a monkey.

are you sure?

Many animals recognize themselves and their species as separate concepts

He meant something more meta I believe. Knowing you are a monkey is one thing, and knowing that you know you are a monkey is a another thing. It's about being cognisant of the fact that there is something called knowledge and you have it

Precisely. To put it more concretely: it is no small feat to grasp the abstract distinction between known-knowns, known-unknowns, unknown-knowns, and unknown-unknowns. They do not know what they do not know.

How do you know?