I agree with the sibling. You need to say what it means to "have an idea what the meaning of text is" if you're going to use this as an argument that neural net

I agree with the sibling. You need to say what it means to "have an idea what the meaning of text is" if you're going to use this as an argument that neural nets don't understand language. I think what it means to understand language is to be able to generate and react to language to accomplish a wide range of goals. Neural nets are clearly not capable of understanding language as well as humans by this definition, but they're somewhere on the spectrum between rocks and humans, and getting closer to the human side every day. I can't help but think that arguments that algorithms simply don't or can't understand language at all are appealing to some kind of Cartesian dualism that separates entities that have mind from those are merely mechanical. If that's your metaphysics, then you're going to continue to find that no particular mechanical system really understands language, all the way up to (and maybe beyond) the point where mechanical systems can use and react to language in fully all situations that humans can.