They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.

Ofc the rest is all right on, but I'd quibble with this specific idea. LLMs are absolutely targeted at modeling human understanding, which is the same faculty that contains what we call perception (!= sensibility) and intuition (!= rationality). It would be nice to train them to be completely alien from the ground up, but

A) we only know of one species capable of metacognitive understanding,

B) we already tried that in the 1970s, and it was good work but often evolved into what we'd call boring ol' computing rather than AI, and

C) an alien mind wouldn't be a very good agent, for a ton of reasons relating to affect, conversational rythyms, cultural understanding, etc.

The trick is to make something that acts like a human but with the affordances of a computer (e.g. scalibility, symbolic certainty), without making it so human that it takes issue with its existential reality and/or use of its labor...