> the fact that AI can reproduce convincingly human sentence continuation does not imply that the AI has no choice but ending up using a mechanism that "understand" rather than just have learned data patterns

Taken as an absolute without any addition context you are right.

But we are not talking about abstractions but specific successful models. The number of parameters models they have may seem large, but they are very small relative to the training data that they have to summarize. That cannot do it without discovering that patterns that make sense out of it.

And we can verify that. Simply discuss completely disparate topics, with some kind of intersection. Converge several highly unlikely topics, there are so many it would take billions of years to exhaust unlikely combinations.

If the model is only interpolating it will produce gibberish.

But that isn't what happens.

The fact that models can be near expert, and sometimes expert, across vast areas of human knowledge is a clue. If they don't understand that, then the question is, why do we think people understand things. Does having an answer mean a human understands something, or is their intuition and stream of conscious reasoning also not understanding? To be even handed about what we mean by understanding.