Project dossier

Six years into AI research and I genuinely can't define "understanding" anymore

I have been doing AI research for about six years now and I think im starting to lose the plot on what "understanding" even means anymore. Had a weird moment last week. I was reviewing a paper for a conference, standard stuff, some group claiming their model "understands" causal reasoning because it passed a benchmark they designed. And I caught myself writing in the review "the model does not actually understand causality, it is pattern matching on causal-looking structure." And then I stopped,