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On the one hand, yeah, this is totally true, hence the hack where you basically just tell it to use its own output as scratch paper and suddenly it performs much better.
On the other hand, it's always praising with faint damnation when I hear LLMs dismissed as subhuman based on criteria that would also exclude half the kids and a good fraction of the adults I meet. "They sometimes try to make illegal moves when playing chess! Why I never! My brain can do without scratch paper entirely, except of course for hard things like long division, or playing chess without looking at the board."
This is a good attempt at definition, and I'd also agree with your conclusion ... though honestly, in this debate I'd award at least an A-minus worth of partial credit to anyone who proposes any clear definition at all. There are an astonishing number of people (on X, at least; discourse here is a little better) who seem to think that "the hard problem of consciousness" is actually so simple that nothing more explicit than "I'll know it when I see it" is necessary.
To an extent I agree with your point; and I agree that ChatGPT deserves credit for creating a rudimentary modeling system to play a simple game I had invented. I do think there's an important distinction though which is not demonstrated by things like chess, because chess is very different from the types of things man needed to model in the ancestral environment. For example, when it comes to social relations (who hates whom; who's having sex with whom; who knows who hates whom; and so on) people are generally very good at constructing mental models. Similarly, when it comes to organizing, planning and completing tasks, people are pretty good. A human doesn't need any scratch paper to realize pretty quickly that if he walks over to the car wash, he won't have his car there and that's a problem. (Obviously there were no cars or car washes in the ancestral environment, but people did need to figure out what weapons and tools needed to be brought along to hunt.)
I don't think LLMs are there yet when it comes to the sophisticated internal models people have for the kinds of issues we dealt with in the ancestral environment.
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