Intelligent systems need perception to understand, predict, and navigate their environment. These sensory capabilities reflect what’s useful for survival in a specific environment: bats use echolocation, migratory birds sense magnetic fields, Arctic reindeer shift their UV vision seasonally. But when your world is made of text, what do you see? Language models encounter many text-based tasks that benefit from visual or spatial reasoning: parsing ASCII art, interpreting tables, or handling text wrapping constraints. Yet their only “sensory” input is a sequence of integers representing tokens. They must learn perceptual abilities from scratch, developing specialized mechanisms in the process.

Its not quite anthropomorphising but there is a lot of poetry there explaining a statistical model