Technology

that’s really akin to claiming that a mannequin is a human being because it really really looks alike.

For the job of presenting clothes in a shop, it's close enough. The problem domain matters. You can't expect a model that was never trained on a thing to perform well on that thing. Blind people aren't good at drawing pictures either, doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.

The “predictions about the world” you refer to here are instead predictions about the text.

Text that describes the world. What do you think the electrical signal zapping around your brain are? Cats and dogs? The "world" is not what intelligence operates on. Your brain gets sensory information and that's it (see any of Donald Hoffman's talks). Just like ChatGPT gets text. All the "intelligence" does is figuring out patterns in that data and predicting what might come next. More diverse data from different senses of course helps. But as a little bit of playing around with ChatGPT easily shows, quite a lot of our understanding actually does survive getting mapped into the domain of language and text.