This is the wrong context to go with an appeal to authority. I know what the transformer is doing, I've also developed neural networks before (though not profes

This is the wrong context to go with an appeal to authority. I know what the transformer is doing, I've also developed neural networks before (though not professionally). Your experience is working against you in developing your intuition. There's another common fallacy that because we're somehow "inside" the system, that we understand exactly what is going on, or in this case what isn't going on. Language models are composed of variations of matrix multiplications, but that isn't a complete description of their behavior. It's like saying because we've looked inside the brain and there's just electrical and chemical signals, the mind must reside somewhere else. It's just a specious argument.