My mind is still blown in how words and concepts can be translated into high dimensional vertexes and through the math of their position and direction retain their meanings, and even be changed into the correct alternate versions by doing calculations on them. That doesn't mean the vectors understand what they represent, but there's some core level of meaning there. Same with LLMs. No thinking, they screw up stuff that a reasoning being would figure out. Yet there's something in even the simplest local model that is far more than just autocompleting sentences. That is part of the mechanics, but not nearly enough to describe it.