If the multimodal model has embedded deep knowledge about words, concepts, moving images - sure it won’t have a humanlike understanding of what those ‘mean’, but it will have it’s own understanding that is required to allow it to make better predictions based on it’s training data.

It’s true that understanding is quite primitive at the moment, and it will likely take further breakthroughs to crack long horizon problems, but even when we get there it will never understand things in the exact way a human does. But I don’t think that’s the point.