[ben_w]

I don't need the qualia of gamma rays to understand gamma rays, nor to be understood in turn when I say that "I understand gamma rays".

Conversely, I can (and do) have qualia that I do not understand.

The concept of qualia is, I think, pre-paradigmatic — we know of our own, but can't turn that experience into a testable phenomena in the world outside our heads. We don't have any way to know if any given AI does or doesn't have it, nor how that might change as the models go from text to multimodal, or if we give them (real or simulated) embodiment.