It's like saying we don't understand how quantum chromodynamics works. Very few people do, and it's the kind of knowledge not easily distilled for the masses in an easily digestible in a popsci way.

Look into how older CNNs work -- we have very good visual/accesible/popsci materials on how they work.

I'm sure we'll have that for LLM but it's not worth it to the people who can produce that kind of material to produce it now when the field is moving so rapidly, those people's time is much better used in improving the LLMs.

The kind of progress being made leads me to believe there absolutely ARE people who absolutely know how the LLMs work and they're not just a bunch of monkeys randomly throwing things at GPUs and seeing what sticks.

LLMs are more analogous to economics, psychology, politics -- it is possible there's a core science with explicability, but the systems are so complex that even defining the question is hard.