Now that’s an interesting claim - that I would deeply dispute. It learns from text. Text itself is a model of reality. So chatgtp if anything proves that in order to be good at predicting the next word all you need is a good model of a model of reality. GTP knows nothing of actual reality only the statistics around symbol patterns that occur in text.
>> "good model of a model of reality"
That is just a model of reality. Also, a "model of reality" is what you'd typically call a world model. Its an intuition for how the world works, how people behave, that apples fall from trees and that orange is more similar to red than it is to grey.
Your last line shows that you still have a superficial understanding of what its learning. Yes it is statistics, but even our understanding of the world is statistical. The equations we have in our head of how the world works are not exact, they're probabilistic. Humans know that "Apples fall from the _____" should be filled with 'tree' with a high probability because that's where apples grow. Yes, we have seen them grow there, whereas the AI model has only read about the growing on trees. But that distinction is moot because both the AI model and humans express their understanding in the same way. The assertion we're making is that to be able to predict the next word well, you need an internal world model. And GPT4 has learnt that world model well, despite not having sensory inputs.