I work in computer vision; "understanding" here is meant to mean there is a statistical understanding. The model better represents the distribution of things th

I work in computer vision; "understanding" here is meant to mean there is a statistical understanding. The model better represents the distribution of things that look like real images. I must say these examples are incredibly good at generating coherent scenes compared to any similar attempts I've seen. I do think it represents an advance in the that kind of understanding. I think your definition of "understanding" is more the realm of AI, and why so many people in my field sigh when the term "AI" is used when we're really just talking about ML. But then again, you could absolutely in the current day train an ML model to look at images and then produce a natural language "explanation" of the image. It might not be able to make leaps in deductive logic, but it would be able to explain more than just a list of what is in the image. Is this "understanding"? Maybe that question is philosophy.