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Not OP, but speaking from a fairly deep layman understanding of how LLMs work - all anyone really knows is that capabilities of fundamentally higher orders (like deception, which requires theory of mind) emerged by simply training larger networks. Since we don’t have a great understanding of how our own intelligence emerges from our wetware, we’re only guessing.
What makes the “spicy autocomplete” perspective incomplete is also what makes LLMs work. The “Attention is All You Need” paper that introduced attention transformers describes a type of self-awareness necessary to predict the next word. In the process of writing the next word of an essay, it navigates a 22,000-dimensional semantic space, And the similarity to the way humans experience language is more than philosophical - the advancements in LLMs have sparked a bunch of new research in neurology.