It must have some internal models of some things, or else it wouldn't be possible to consistently make coherent and mostly reasonable statements. But the fact that it has a reasonable model of things like grammar and conversation doesn't imply that it has a good model of literally anything else, which is unlike a human for whom a basic set of cognitive skills is presumably transferable. Still, the success of LLMs in their actual language-modeling objective is a promising indication that it's feasible for a ML model to learn complex abstractions.