The fact that you ask that is in many ways the difference. You feel there’s a limitation in your knowledge of the term “understand” and its use in this context

The fact that you ask that is in many ways the difference. You feel there’s a limitation in your knowledge of the term “understand” and its use in this context and would like clarification before you’re more certain, either way. At some point either enough information arrives to convince you, or you decide it’s not true. Whatever that process and internal states are, is something GPT can’t do. It’ll 100% confidently produce something and be fully rewarded that it chose tokens that humans would most likely choose given the preceding tokens. There’s no “aha”.