Of course, "Attention is All You Need" was one of the most discussed papers in our field; there are entire podcast episodes dedicated to it, so it should be easy for a LLM to create a new one.
For all the other papers, assuming they were impactful, they must have been referred by others, highlighting what their contribution is, what is controversial, etc.
In other words: the LLM doesn't have to "understand" the paper; it can simply parrot what others have been saying/writing about it.
(For example: a podcast about Google Illuminate could use our brief exchange to discuss the possible merits of this technology.)
It shouldn't be surprising that a LLM is able to understand a paper, just upload one to Claude 3.5 Sonnet.