[ehsanu1]

Whether we are on the cusp really depends on what we mean by "natural language understanding" specifically. What about Watson? It seems to "understand" quite a bit of natural language just fine and can answer interesting questions posed in same. If that doesn't count as "understanding", I'd like to know what does? It probably can't do extended reasoning based on its "understanding", but that would seem to me to be moving the goal posts.

I doubt that a sufficiently well-defined notion of natural language understanding that does not specifically include strong artificial intelligence in its definition would require strong AI. Constructing such a definition is left as an exercise to the reader.

Thinking that strong AI is required for natural language understanding may end up being similar to how it was once thought that beating humans at chess would require advanced AI. Brute forse can do wonderful things, as can weak AI.