It's not about sensory inputs, it's about having a model of the world and objects in it and ability to make predictions.
> The important part is that the AI can figure out the pattern in the data it does get and so far AI systems are doing very well.
GPT cannot "figure" anything out. That's the point. It only probabilistically generates text. That's what it does, there is no model of the world behind it, no predictions, no"figuring out".