“There is the high road of linguistic data, in which we learn that “spider” goes with “web”. Then there is the low road of perceptual data, in which we catch sight of an eight-legged insect at the centre of a geometric lattice, glinting in the morning dew. Most people have the luxury of travelling down both routes, and so can learn to connect words with words, objects with objects, words with objects, and objects with words. LLMs that are trained exclusively as chatbots, by contrast, can only travel on the high road – they can only use linguistic data to learn about the world. This means that any thinking or reasoning that they might do will inevitably be very different from our own.”