Anyone who has used one of the better models for any significant amount of time understands this intuitively. It's only "controversial" because of strong biase

Anyone who has used one of the better models for any significant amount of time understands this intuitively. It's only "controversial" because of strong biases. Also, people may not be separating all of the various types of characteristics that animals like humans have. So they may subconsciously feel that to attribute "understanding" they have to give these systems all of the other abilities also. I think that actually Hinton at one point was doing this. That causes people to deny obvious abilities because they think they are linked to other qualities that the models don't have.