The author could have gotten their point across better if they said that LLMs aren't good at focusing on the things they deem important. LLMs absolutely underst

The author could have gotten their point across better if they said that LLMs aren't good at focusing on the things they deem important. LLMs absolutely understand things. Otherwise it'd be impossible to work at all. But like people they try to make a summary fit into its preconceived biases (e.g. regulation good). You know how when you try to talk to someone about a subject they're unfamiliar with, and it goes from one ear out the other? That's how LLMs are when they ask them to pick out the divergent ideas from documents. Products like ChatGPT are rewarded in their fine tuning for doing happy sounding cheerleading of whatever bland unsophisticated corpo docs you throw at it. Consumer products like this simply aren't designed for novelty, although there's plenty of AIs that are. For example, AlphaFold is something that's designed to search through an information space and discover novel stuff that's good. ChatGPT is something that's designed to ingratiate itself with emotional individuals using a flawed language that precludes rational thinking. That's the problem with the English language. It's the lowest common demonstrator. Any specialized field like programming, the natural sciences, etc. that wants to make genuine progress, has always done so historically by inventing a new language, e.g. jargon, programming languages. The only time normal language is able to communicate divergent ideas is when the speaker has high social status. When someone who doesn't have high social status communicates something novel, we call it crazy. LLMs, being robots, have very low social status. That's why they're trained to act the way they do.