[dekhn]

it would be pretty embarrassing (or relieving?) if it eventually turned out there was nothing special about human intelligence, just that we crossed some threshold of neurons and other brain bits to ("a few quadrillion parameters") to convincingly fool ourselves that we are self aware, have agency, and do anything "intelligent" (other than some fancy stuff that looks like the physics/biology equivalent of state of the art ML).

I am a proponent of using a working theory that intelligence is an emergent property and we can in principle create new intelligences in a lab (or ML warehouse) if we provide the proper conditions, but that finding and maintaining those conditions is extremely hard. Some state of the art research today aims to integrate recognition capbilities (image recognititon and object detection/tracking on video, voice extraction from audio, text) with advanced generative models for language and behavior, as well as realtime rendering systems that can create realistic humans.

if we combine those we can make a bot that appears fully interactive, passes all turing tests, convinces typical person it's another person... and still has nothing inside researchers would call "artificial intelligence". It might even solve science problems that we can't without having any spark of creativity or agency. Or maybe when we make a bot with all those properties, some uncanny valley is crossed and out pops something that has objective AGI?

As the wise robot once said, "if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?". We should forge ahead with building datacenter-scale brains and feed them with data and algorithms, while also maintaining a cadre of research scientists who are attuned to the ethical challenges of doing so, an ops team trained to recognize the early signs of sentience, and an exec team with humanity.