Does understanding require consciousness? Maybe yes, for the kind of understanding I'm thinking of, but I'm not certain of that.
How do you measure understanding? You step a bit outside the training set, and see if whoever (or whatever) being tested can apply what it has learned in that somewhat novel situation. That's hard when ChatGPT has been trained on the entire internet. But to the degree we can test it, ChatGPT often falls down horribly. (It even falls down on things that should be within its training set.) So we conclude that it doesn't actually understand.
How come humans are so efficient when these computers are using enormous amounts of energy? When will we have a computer that only requires a few slices of pizza worth of energy to get to the next step?
But I suspect your notion of understanding is not measurable, is it? For you, chatGPT lacks something essential such that it is incapable of understanding, no matter the test. Or do you have a way to measure this without appeal to consciousness or essentialism?