It seems to me that the human authors of the training text are the ones who have created the “world model”, and have encoded it into written language. The llm transcodes this model into word embedding vector space. I think most people can recognize a high dimensional vector space as a reasonable foundation for a mathematical “model”. The humans are the ones who have interacted with the world and have perceived its workings. The llm only interacts with the human’s language model. Some credit must be given to the humans modellers for the unreasonable effectiveness of the llm.