Those who intuit something is lacking in LLMs struggle to pinpoint the gap beyond inadequate metaphors like “stochastic parrot” or “glorified autocomplete.” What you’re groping for is fractured entangled representation (FER). That’s the concrete crux of your slippery intuitions. It’s why these models can keep improving in dramatic and genuinely nontrivial ways yet still suffer from an underlying sickness. It’s where real opportunity and hope lie for revolutionary progress, Representation is at the heart of thought, of creativity, and indeed of intelligence itself. It is possible to “know” an unfathomable amount and yet still represent it poorly. And it’s possible for representation to be better. And it will ultimately happen one way or another.