Noam Chomsky criticizes large language models as useless — fundamentally, by the way they are designed — for advancing understanding of cognition. This is because cognition plays no part in them. They don't try to understand anything.

Machine-learning systems can do many practical tasks well — those tasks that don't inherently involve conceptual understanding of anything. They can be useful, for good purposes and bad purposes. At the same time, they can treat their users justly (if released as free software) or unjustly (if released as nonfree software or only as a "service")

But we should distinguish this from intelligence, and reserve the term artificial intelligence for artificial systems that can understand.