Yeah, it has been clear for a long time that there is reasoning and mental modeling going on here.
The other option is that you do understand those words the same way, and the people making these (now nonsensical) anti-AI claims simply aren’t talking about the same programs/models we are. Their idea of SOTA is when chatgpt.com launched.
If you took a point sample pre-Opus, and didn’t write a good prompt, of course you would think all AI programming was worthless slop.
Maybe get yourself checked for chatbot psychosis. I am using current models productively, every day, and have 0 (and I mean precisely, literally 0) issue with calling it a stochastic parrot, one which lacks any kind of mentality whatsoever. There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that this is purely a statistical model, generating sequences of words, that happen to make sense in our actual mentality.