The author discusses the philosophical challenge of translating Aristotle's works, particularly the concept of 'episteme' (understanding vs. knowledge), and reflects on how this distinction becomes relevant when evaluating OpenAI's claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem and the role of formal proofs in mathematics.
A paper introduces a formal framework to evaluate whether LLMs truly understand concepts or merely demonstrate 'potemkin understanding'—the illusion of understanding through answers incompatible with human interpretation. The researchers find that LLMs exhibit widespread failures across models and domains, reflecting internal incoherence in concept representations rather than genuine comprehension.