Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those billion parameters, they are a model of the world. Autocomplete is such a shortsighted understanding of LLMs.
Sorry for the late response. Yes that is Hinton's argument, and the claim made by the believers. On the other hand, if the GAC explanation is correct, an explanation might be that what we humans write down (that is, the training corpus) is a model of the world, and LLMs reconstruct (descriptions of) human understanding.
Now of course, the only input LLMs have is human text (for text only LLMs anyway). So their model is entirely dependent on how we see the world.
I wouldn't restrict LLMs to description of human understanding. They can articulate concepts in a rather sensible way, that wouldn't exist as is in the training corpus. Which exactly means that they have a model, however limited or imperfect.