> they don't fundamentally "get it"

There's no clear decision criteria for this. Do trick questions demonstrate that most people don't "get it"? And, well, older model saying dumb things doesn't establish a general principle that LLMs don't "get it" in general.

> The sample efficiency is just crazy low

Autoregressive pretraining requires huge amount of data to go from a blank state to a somewhat functional model. Fine-tuning, LORA, reinforcement learning of foundation models and in-context learning are much more sample efficient.

> Chinese room

...creates a wrong intuition that by cranking a Leibniz's mill you are somehow responsible for whether it understands something or not.