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The comment you are replying to is not claiming ignorance of how models work. It is saying that the author does know how they work, and they do not contain anything that can properly be described as "hidden state". The claimed confusion is over how the term "hidden state" is being used, on the basis that it is not being used correctly.

I don't think your response is very productive, and I find that my understanding of LLMs aligns with the person you're calling out. We could both be wrong, but I'm grateful that someone else spoke saying that it doesn't seem to match their mental model and we would all love to learn a more correct way of thinking about LLMs.

Telling us to just go and learn the math is a little hurtful and doesn't really get me any closer to learning the math. It gives gatekeeping.

Do you appreciate a difference between an autoregressive model and a recurrent model?

The "transformer" part isn't under question. It's the "hidden state" part.