Novelty is not the same as understanding. I think it’s telling that one of the two probably works at least as well with something that’s the opposite of a bridg

Novelty is not the same as understanding. I think it’s telling that one of the two probably works at least as well with something that’s the opposite of a bridge: gulf, chasm, wall. It just picked a pattern for an analogy and stuck your word in it, mad-libs style. Like, the fact that it’s kinda the opposite of what me would expect makes it a bit poetic in that one’s tempted to pursue what it might mean, but of course the LLM didn’t mean anything (though we still might find meaning). Its patterns encoded two items and “between” being likely to occur, anyway.