Speaking as someone who thinks the Chinese Room argument is an obvious case of begging the question, GP isn't about that. They're not saying that LLMs don't have world models - they're saying that those world models are not based in physical world and thus cannot properly understand what they talk about.
I don't think that's true anymore, though. All the SOTA models are multimodal now, meaning that they are trained on images and videos as well, not just text; and they do that is precisely because it improves the text output as well, for this exact reason. Already, I don't have to waste time explaining to Claude or Codex what I want on a webpage - I can just sketch a mock-up, or when there's a bug, I take a screenshot and circle the bits that are wrong. But this extends into the ability to reason about real world, as well.
I don't think that's true anymore, though. All the SOTA models are multimodal now, meaning that they are trained on images and videos as well, not just text; and they do that is precisely because it improves the text output as well, for this exact reason. Already, I don't have to waste time explaining to Claude or Codex what I want on a webpage - I can just sketch a mock-up, or when there's a bug, I take a screenshot and circle the bits that are wrong. But this extends into the ability to reason about real world, as well.