That’s not what they said.

What people are calling “AI” today is not AI in the sense of how laypeople understand it. Personally I hate the use of the term in this context and think it would have been much better to stick with Machine Learning (often just ML). Regardless, the point is that you cannot get from these system to what you think of as AI. To get there it would require new, different systems. Or changing these systems so thoroughly as to make them unrecognizable from their origins.

If you put e.g. ChatGPT into a robotic body with sensors… you’d get nothing. It has no concept of a body. No concept of controlling the body. No concept of operating outside of the constraints within which it already operates. You could debate if it has some inhuman concept of language, but that debate is about as far as you can go.

Actual AI in the sense of how we conceive of it at a societal level is something else. It very well may be that many years down the line that historians will look back at the ML advancements happening today as a major building block for the creation of that “true” AI of the future, but as-is they are not the same thing.

To put it another way: what happens if you connect the algorithms controlling a video game NPC to a robotic body? Absolutely nothing. Same deal here.