This all just boils down to the Chinese Room thought experiment, where Im pretty sure the consensus is nothing in the experiment (not the person inside, the whole emergent room, etc) understands Chinese like us.

Another example by Searle is a computer simulating digestion is not digesting like a stomach.

The people saying AI can’t form from LLMs are in the consensus side of the Chinese Room. The digestion simulator could tell us where every single atom is of a stomach digesting a meal, and it’s still not digestion. Only once the computer simulation breaks down food particles chemically and physically is it digestion. Only once an LLM received photons or has a physical capacity to receive photons is there anything like “seeing a night sky”.