LLMs can understand time now

Google released Gemini 2.5 yesterday, and og_kalu made an observation on Hacker News noticing that it was a huge advancement in AI novel writing.

As they put it:

You can't really give LLMs any details of your story because they get absolutely neurotic with it.

What does it mean to be neurotic? They continue:

Imagine you give the LLM the profile of the love interest for your epic fantasy, it will almost always have the main character meeting them within 3 pages (usually page 1), which is of course absolutely nonsensical pacing.

As someone who’s dabbled with LLM storywriting, this matches my experience exactly. LLMs have gotten pretty good at writing any one paragraph, but there’s something nonsensical about their output at the level of pages and chapters. At least when it comes to pacing a story.

It's as if they lack a sense of scale: with respect to time, with respect to relationships, and with respect to how events unfold in the world.

So what's changed

og_kalu reported relatively “sane” pacing across 19 straight pages of narrative generation.

Why that matters

It would be tempting to chalk this up to “merely a longer context window,” but I think that’s underselling it.

I think LLMs are beginning to incorporate a sense of time into their world model.

There’s an argument that LLMs need to build an internal model of the world in order to predict the next token accurately. Essentially, “even if we're all stochastic parrots, the only way to be a good parrot is to understand the world.”

That argument extends easily to next-paragraph, next-page, or next-chapter prediction. To predict good chapters, you need a good world model. But while the world model for next-token prediction doesn't require any notion of time, the world model for next-chapter prediction does. Otherwise the pacing reads nonsentically

The only way to write a good Chatper 1 is to understand time.

Not time as a wall-clock, necessarily.

But time as a vector-clock, the way we humans experience it. The general ordering of things; the general assignment of pace and attention given to each moment relative to one another.

I’m not sure yet what that means other than better storytelling, but it feels like an important development.