Sure they care about elegance, or at least brevity. Minimizing tokens out, or generally "token efficiency," is part of the objective function for these systems. It doesn't mean they are perfect at it though.
"They" don't "care" about anything. It is a stateless computational run across thousands of semiconductors. There is no objective this software has other than the computational function completing. To care would mean the model would have a level of discernment that goes along with sentience.
The supposed "magicality" of human consciousness is hard to reconcile with evolution -- where on that long path from amoeba to homo sapiens did God (PBUH) implant our connections to the soul realm?
Even evolution-deniers run into difficult-to-justify self-contradictions when trying to explain how the supposed supernatural part of our consciousness is both affecting the natural world and affected by the natural world, but not part of it.
> Minimizing tokens out, or generally "token efficiency," is part of the objective function for these systems.
First time I heard that, and I doubt it. Don’t customers pay for output tokens? If so, why would a company specifically spend time training their LLM to generate fewer?
Even if you specifically train the model on producing shorter answers, I would think producing good short answers would require more resources just as it does for humans (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/: “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”)
If so, charging per output token is the wrong incentive.