If you want a more concrete example, then LLMs are also trained on visual data these days, which means they do have access to the world in an important way. This directly contradicts the blogpost's claim that LLMs have
> no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.
Historically, that LLMs were text-only used to be a major argument for why they "lack access to meaning", see the Stochastic Parrot paper and the Octopus paper that it references. But even the authors of those papers have (grudgingly) conceded that the argument no longer holds due to multimodality.
> no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.
Historically, that LLMs were text-only used to be a major argument for why they "lack access to meaning", see the Stochastic Parrot paper and the Octopus paper that it references. But even the authors of those papers have (grudgingly) conceded that the argument no longer holds due to multimodality.