They are what she researches though. She has published research on them.

LLMs don't directly use concepts from linguistics but they do produce and model language/grammar; it's entirely valid to use techniques from those fields to evaluate them, which is what she does. In the same vein, though a self-driving car doesn't work the same way as a human driver does, we can measure their performance on similar tasks.

Hmm I looked into it, and looked at papers/pdfs in google scholar's advanced search with her as an author that mentioned LLMs or GPT in the past 3 years. Every single one was a criticism about how they couldn't actually understand anything (e.g. "they're only trained on form" and "at best they can only understand things in a limited well scoped fashion") and that linguistic fundamentals for NLP was more important.

Good to know my hunch was correct