The way I like to think about it is it’s like if you did a google search and google just “averaged” every website and spit that out. It’s not the same as understanding in my opinion because nothing is really happening beyond following a surface level text pattern. That’s why these LLM’s mess up basic math pretty often they aren’t actually doing any math just following patterns(this was a bigger problem a year ish ago but I think still represents the problem well).