So going by your comment about the embeddings, it still doesn't have any understanding of the concept the words it's grouping. The only thing it actually knows about these individual words is which part of speech they are and which group they are in

What I'm saying is that knowing how words are related to each other is probably the same thing as "understanding" the underlying concepts. For example, knowing that "queen" relates to "king" as "woman" relates to "man", captures at least something from reality.