[baddox]

That example seems pretty unrelated to what I would think of as “understanding.” That’s more just a feature request for Siri.

It’s like saying “my calculator lets me type ’1 + 2 =’ and gives me the answer ‘3,’ so it seems to understand that question, but when I look at the calculator I see there’s no ‘sqrt’ button that would show me the square root of 3.”

The fact that my basic calculator doesn’t have a “sqrt” button is pretty irrelevant to how well it “understands” how to add two numbers together.

[taneq]

Your basic calculator still has a concept of context, though. If you go '1 + 2 =' then it will give you '3', and if you press '/ 2 =' then it will give you '1.5'. It 'remembers what you were talking about' within its very limited scope.

I think what they were trying to get at is that understanding is stateful.