Taste for Words, Childhood, LLMs, and World Models

Abstract

This research offers an interdisciplinary reading of contemporary transformations of language in the era of large-scale language models (LLMs) and so-called world model architectures. By combining Françoise Héritier’s anthropology of language with Alexander Grothendieck’s reflections on childhood and invention, it develops the hypothesis that childhood—understood as an epistemic regime of openness, indeterminacy, and receptiveness to reality—constitutes an essential key to understanding both human creativity and the structural limitations of contemporary artificial intelligence. The article shows that, while LLMs exhibit remarkable capacities for linguistic recomposition based on statistical regularities, they remain devoid of experiential grounding and are not embodied in the world. Similarly, world models, although they aim to integrate perception, prediction, and simulation, remain embedded in a modeling logic that cannot be equated with a genuine engagement with reality. Drawing on Héritier's notion of "a taste for words" and Grothendieck's idea of "cognitive innocence," the analysis highlights a fundamental tension between the algorithmic production of forms and the lived experience of meaning. This leads to a reformulation of childhood as a critical epistemological category, allowing us to conceive of creativity as an openness to the not-already-given, irreducible to any computational formalization.