[unbalancedevh]

It seems to me that there's a fundamental difference between how you would train an AI to provide a reasonable, coherent text-based or languaged-based response as part of a conversation; and how you would train it to optimize for a specific set of rules or goals. If you asked an LLM to formulate and explain a tic-tac-toe strategy, I expect it would respond with something robust.

[d_legs]

Agreed. I tried asking the models to outline a strategy and they can produce a decent output although not as robust as I expected. I'm sure you could fine tune an LLM to be good at Tic-Tac-Toe too but the surprising thing to me was how LLMs--even top ones like gpt-4.5 don't generalize well enough to be half decent at a simple game.

[AnimalMuppet]

That's kind of the thing, though, isn't it? It can explain a robust strategy, but it can't play it. That's really different from human intelligence, to the point where it seems reasonable to claim that the LLM doesn't really understand what it's saying.