"I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything."

Why does the LLM need to understand anything. What today's chatbots have achieved is a software engineering feat. They have taken a stateless token generation machine that has compressed the entire internet's vocabulary to predict the next token and have 'hacked' a whole state management machinery around it. End result is a product that just feels like another human conversing with you and remembering your last birthday.

Engineering will surely get better and while purists can argue that a new research perspective is needed, the current growth trajectory of chatbots, agents and code generation tools will carry the torch forward for years to come.

If you ask me, this new AI winter will thaw in the atmosphere even before it settles on the ground.