ML in general is alien to how we think of intelligence.

The closest I can make a biology analogy, is if someone had an immortal and congenitally-brain-damaged large rodent, and mapped tokens to different scent molecules, and spent 800,000 years training it on how well it could imagine the next smell in the sequence before even considering making it conversational.

Yes, it can do a lot.

But also, it took a long "subjective" (if it even has that) time to get there; and despite it being really bad at learning from examples, it is pretty surprising that such a small brain was even capable of learning so much at all, even though it had an effectively unbounded (by biological standards) amount of time spent on that training.