We keep saying AI "understands" things. Does it? Or are we just pattern-matching our own anthropomorphism?

Every week there's a new paper or tweet claiming some model "understands" context, "reasons" about math, or "knows" what it doesn't know. But when you look closely, there's almost no consensus on what "understanding" even means - philosophically or empirically. Searle's Chinese Room argument is 40 years old and still hasn't been cleanly resolved. The "stochastic parrot" framing treats token prediction as the ceiling. Integrated Information Theory would say current architectures are near-zero in phi. And yet GPT-4 passes the bar exam.