Comment by roughly

> But what exactly is understanding?

He alludes to quite a bit here - impossible languages, intrinsic rules that don’t actually express in the language, etc - that leads me to believe there’s a pretty specific sense by which he means “understanding,” and I’d expect there’s a decent literature in linguistics covering what he’s referring to. If it’s a topic of interest to you, chasing down some of those leads might be a good start.

(I’ll note as several others have here too that most of his language seems to be using specific linguistics terms of art - “language” for “human language” is a big tell, as is the focus on understanding the mechanisms of language and how humans understand and generate languages - I’m not sure the critique here is specifically around LLMs, but more around their ability to teach us things about how humans understand language.)