By a statistical model I mean a very large, highly dimensional data manifold on which classification is done to predict the next token. The correct token can be

By a statistical model I mean a very large, highly dimensional data manifold on which classification is done to predict the next token. The correct token can be predicted very often because somehow the common patterns in the written training data are being efficiently compressed in this highly dimensional space. Humans are also able to efficiently compress the data they are trained on, but the structures inside a human and a transformer are completely different, what happens at inference time is completely different. They both have language in common as an output and can both answer TOM questions but this doesn't mean they both have a theory of mind.