Sort of, but you need to separate the model from the interface. The base models pretty much think they’re you, and the chat stuff is bolted on top. It’s kind of a round peg square hole thing, or i.o.w. the whole may be less than the sum of the parts.

Longer term I dunno if statistics or “fits the shape of what a response might look like” is the right way of thinking about it either because what’s actually happening might change from under you. It’s possible given enough parameters anything humans care about is separable. The process of discovering those numbers and the numbers themselves are different.