>> they channel the intelligence of a vast number of humans by pattern matching their utterances to a query.
Just a little problem with that: to understand the utterances of a vast number of humans you need to channel it to something that can understand the utterances of humans in the first place. Just channeling it around from statistic to statistic doesn't do the trick.
Um, the "something" is the person reading the LLM's output. I'm afraid that you have completely missed the context and point of the discussion, which was not about LLMs understanding things--they understand nothing ("LLMs have no cognitive states"). But again, "because of how extremely well the statistical apparatus works", their outputs are useful to intelligent consumers who do have cognitive states--us.