I disagree - I think they're producing meaning. There is clearly a concept that they've chosen (or been tasked) to communicate. If you ask it the capital of Oregon, the meaning is to tell you it's Salem. However, the words chosen around that response are definitely a result of a language model that does its best to predict which words should be used to communicate this.
It doesn't "know" that the capital of Oregon is Salem. To take an extreme example, if everyone on the internet made up a lie that the capital of Oregon is another city, and we trained a model on that, it would respond with that information. The words "the capital of Oregon is Salem" do not imply that the LLM actually knows that information. It's just that Salem statistically most frequently appears as the capital of Oregon in written language.
