(Poster from several comments upstream.) I'm not trying to deny the ChatGPT model has formed higher-level abstractions; in fact, I think it's fairly obvious you

(Poster from several comments upstream.) I'm not trying to deny the ChatGPT model has formed higher-level abstractions; in fact, I think it's fairly obvious you have to do this in some way in order to obtain such a level of breadth and accuracy of response. However those abstractions and their formation still boil down to statistics. This is similar to how e.g. mechanics of macroscopic bodies still boils down and reduces to quantum field theory and gravity, even though that's not the best way to explain or understand what's going on.