> In the same way if you understand the implementation of these types of language models you know that they simply cannot have inner monologues in the same way we do...the very concept of an inner monologue implies that there is some sort of state that we the user cannot see.

I'm with you on the point you'd like to make, but LLMs obviously do have state that we cannot see. In fact, there are two different levels of obvious state: one allows the LLM to (for example) respond to input instead of ignoring it, which we may characterize as "unlearned" behavior. The level people are more interested in is the "finished model", the set of associations it learns in training. It's state and we can't see it.

The internal state of the model, at those levels, doesn't change when you interact with it. But the state is there.

(There is also a "working state", the state the model must keep in order to output different tokens in sequence, and in order to at some point decide that it's finished responding to a prompt. This does change during your interaction with the model, but the change is not persistent.)