I think you must either admit that chatgpt does exactly this, or else give up our traditional connotation of "understand". Chatgpt has never seen a sunset, felt pain, fallen in love, etc, yet it can discuss them coherently; to call that understanding the world is to implicitly say that the world can be understood solely through reading about it and keeping track of which words follow which. It's amazing that generating text from statistical relationships about tokens in a corpus, which generated nonsensical-but-grammatical sentence fragments at smaller scales, can expand to concepts and essays with more compute, but it is just a difference in scale.
> I’d be careful calling it simple.
I'm not calling it simple, I'm calling us simple! I'm saying that chatgpt is proof that natural language processing is much easier than I previously thought.