You're making my point for me. My calculator doesn't has a conception of numbers or math. It can only do arithmetic algorithms that it was programmed to do. It is a regurgitation machine.

GPTs are similar. They can tell you that the sky is blue and they can tell you why the sky is blue, but they can't translate that to a hypothesis about how the wavelengths of light also influence the properties of lasers. If they've ingested information about these different topics, they can make the connection, but otherwise they can't.