[wilg]

This is a fine definition of understanding.

However, I don't understand why we're leaping to "first-grader" as a low level of intelligence. That level of general intelligence in a machine would be a monumental achievement, I would think.

I also don't understand why you think responding to arithmetic problems, via parsing natural language, while neither being designed to perform arithmetic nor trained on it directly would be "simple".

It's not fair to say the words convey "no information", they do convey information, just not information that is useful to you. There is a ton of information in the structure of the words it generates, and it is often semantically and syntactically correct, and both of those contain information.

This is clearly not particularly useful, but it does demonstrate some sort (and I would argue your sort) of understanding.

The question is not whether it understands math and language as well as a first grader, it's whether it understands anything at all.