To follow your hypothetical, if an Orca were to be exposed to human language, discussing human terrestrial affairs, and were able to at least learn some of the patterns, and maybe predict them, then it should indeed be considered not to have any understanding of what that stream of words meant - I wouldn't even elevate it to '2nd hand hearsay'.
Still, the Orca, unlike an LLM, does at least does have a brain, and does live in and interact with the real world, and could probably be said to "understand" things in it's own watery habitat as well as we do.
Regarding "input supremacy" :
It's not the LLMs "world of words" that really sets it apart from animals/humans, since there are also multi-model LLMs with audio and visual inputs more similar to a humans sensory inputs. The real difference is what they are doing with those inputs. The LLM is just a passive observer, whose training consisted of learning patterns in it's inputs. A human/animal is an active agent, interacting with the world, and thereby causing changes in the input data it is then consuming. The human/animal is learning how to DO things, and gaining understanding of how the word reacts. The LLM is learning how to COPY things.
There are of course many other differences between LLMs/Transformers and animal brains, but even if we were to eliminate all these differences the active vs passive one would still be critical.
To follow your hypothetical, if an Orca were to be exposed to human language, discussing human terrestrial affairs, and were able to at least learn some of the patterns, and maybe predict them, then it should indeed be considered not to have any understanding of what that stream of words meant - I wouldn't even elevate it to '2nd hand hearsay'.
Still, the Orca, unlike an LLM, does at least does have a brain, and does live in and interact with the real world, and could probably be said to "understand" things in it's own watery habitat as well as we do.
Regarding "input supremacy" :
It's not the LLMs "world of words" that really sets it apart from animals/humans, since there are also multi-model LLMs with audio and visual inputs more similar to a humans sensory inputs. The real difference is what they are doing with those inputs. The LLM is just a passive observer, whose training consisted of learning patterns in it's inputs. A human/animal is an active agent, interacting with the world, and thereby causing changes in the input data it is then consuming. The human/animal is learning how to DO things, and gaining understanding of how the word reacts. The LLM is learning how to COPY things.
There are of course many other differences between LLMs/Transformers and animal brains, but even if we were to eliminate all these differences the active vs passive one would still be critical.