The question of whether, or to what extent, LLMs understand anything is an interesting one, tied up with our difficulty in saying what 'understanding' means, be

The question of whether, or to what extent, LLMs understand anything is an interesting one, tied up with our difficulty in saying what 'understanding' means, beyond broad statements along the lines of it being an ability to see the implications of our knowledge and use it in non-rote and creative ways. The most honest answer to these questions I can give is to say "I don't know", though I'm toying with the idea that they understand (in some sense) the pragmatics of language use, but not that language refers to an external world which changes according to rules and causes that are independent of what we can and do say about it. This would be a very strange state to be in, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in such a state. We have never met anybody or anything like it.