> What made you believe this is true?

I am yet to see a theory coming of the LLM that is sufficiently interesting. My comment was answering your question of what does it mean to "understanding something". My answer to that is: understanding something is knowing the theory of it.

Now, that begs the question of what is a theory. And to answer that, a theory comprises of building block symbols and a set of rules to combine them. for example, building blocks for space (and geometry) could be points, lines, etc. The key point in all of this is symbolism as abstractions to represent things in some world.

The "sufficiently interesting" part is the most important qualifier here. My response was talking about theories and representations that we already know, either instinctively from near-birth, or from learned experience. We have not seen anything unique from LLMs because they do not appear to have an internal understanding (in the same sense that I was talking about) that is as broad as an adult human. But that doesn't mean it lacks any understanding.

> The key point in all of this is symbolism as abstractions to represent things in some world.

The difficulty is understanding how to extract this information from the model, since the output of the LLM is actually a very poor representation of its internal state.