You say that but we have models of meaning in humans too.

You can put people in an fMRI and ask them to think "car".

You can ask someone to think of objects and detect when they think "car".

What happened there pairing a bunch of tensors to meanings and matching them.

We can do something similar with embeddings.

To be clear I don't intend to give the impression that these LLMs are doing something miraculous. Just that we are increasingly peeling back the veil of how brains think.