[mattnewton]

You don't think we can "fake it" in the the vast statistical majority of cases simply by relying on a corpus containing nearly the same cases?

We can already "understand the meaning" in a latent space well enough to do machine translation between language pairs the model wasn't trained on, or do additions and subtractions in the latent space of word to vec to suggest they have picked up some semantic meaning from the text.

I don't think this is a problem that requires Strong AI in the vast majority of cases, just very large well groomed corpa and clever engineers.