so your definition of "understand" is "able to develop the QC test (or explain tests already developed)"

I hate to break it to you, but the LLMs can already do all 3 tasks you outlined

It can be argued for all 3 actors in this example (the QC operator, the PhD chemist and the LLM) that they don't really "understand" anything and are iterating on pre-learned patterns in order to complete the tasks.

Even the ground-breaking chemist researcher developing a new test can be reduced to iterating on the memorized fundamentals of chemistry using a lot of compute (of the meat kind).

The mythical Understanding is just a form of "no true Scotsman"