You can approximate a human capacity, say theory-of-mind, with another kind of ape: play some hide-and-seek game. You can approximate the knowledge of a trivia-master with a child and a trivia book.
These are quite different sorts of approximations. A 1/100th scale bridge build to stand for a real one is quite different than taking some prior set of bridges, measuring them, and deriving some merely associative model of their properties.
My issue in how LLMs (etc.) are popularly understood is that people think they approximate target capacities by being 'ontologically similar' capacities -- and this is really very dangerous. You'll lose your job if you think so (and so on).
And every greasy AI-board hocking these to the public is very much pushing out this noxious mumbojumbo.
It matters greately how an approximation works, and why any given output arrives from any given input.