It's fun to talk about, but personally he whole "understanding" debate is a red herring, imo what we actually care about when we talk about intelligence is the capacity and depth of: second order thinking, regardless of the underlying mechanism. I think personally key question isn't "do LLMs understand?" but, "can LLMs engage in second order thinking?" The answer seems to be yes - they can reason about reasoning, plan their approaches, critique their own outputs, and adapt their strategies, o1 has shown us that with RL and reasoning tokens you can include it in a single system, but our brains have multiple systems we can control and that can be combined in multiple ways at any given moment: emotions, feelings, thoughts combined into user space, 3 core systems input, memory, output. The nuances is in the fact that various reasons (nature + nurture), various humans appear to have varying levels of meta control over the multiple reasoning systems.