Even under the most generous nomenclature, no contemporary LLM understands anything.
They approximate argmax(P_sub_theta(token|prefix)).
This approximation is sometimes useful. I’ve found it to never be useful in writing code or prose about code of any difficulty. That’s my personal anecdote, but one will note that OpenAI and Anthropic still employ a great many software engineers.
I know that, likely everyone here knows that. But understanding is a good approximation for what we mean. Pointing out implementation is needlessly pedantic.
