The steps are understood well enough to instruct machines to do it, even if the output is to complex for us to comprehend it completely. Not so with thought, intelligence, consciousness, etc.
again, no they aren't. In ML, nobody instructs machines to do anything other than train and find those steps themselves. We have no clue what steps GPT takes when it solves problems.
For a straightforward example, when GPT-4 adds, what algorithm does it perform ? I have no clue, you have no clue and neither does anyone at open ai.
What we do is instruct machines to train. What they get out of training, we have very little idea.