> What I'm saying is that this is incorrect. An "idea" exists within a model before it generates tokens.

If that were the case, then the systems would generate words based on the fully resolved idea, but that is not how the LLM systems currently work (per vendors descriptions).

They choose words sequentially and both the specifics of the input as well as the chosen output words significantly impacts not just the rest of the output but the very correctness of the output.

> but not so differently that 'learning stats' would be an inaccurate description.

Agreed, humans are generalizing using some mechanism that can be modeled with math.

But the execution of our reasoning and thought processes is not obviously similar to LLM's next word generation based on probabilities.