[supern0va]

>and even if it requests another angle and is given it, it lacks the capacity to learn that new information permanently.

I'd argue this isn't true today, but that the loop for incorporation is long (ie, the next training or finetuning run).

>A multimodal model knows about images of pipes and facts about pipes, but doesn't know pipes; it doesn't have literally first-hand experience with them.

Wouldn't this mean that any human who hasn't seen a pipe in person or interacted with it, similarly doesn't "know" a pipe? Most of us haven't interacted with the vast majority of "things" in the world, yet we're still able to build a model and abstractions for them such that we can reason about them, right?