Beyond the current news cycle about whether AIs are sentient is a more practical and immediately consequential conversation about AI value alignment: whether and how AIs can be imbued with human values. Today, this turns on the even more fundamental question of whether the newest generation of language models can or can’t understand concepts — and on what it means to understand.¹ If, as some researchers contend, language models are mere “babblers” that randomly regurgitate their training data...