Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. No, it does not. I very much believe AI (or AGI, as you call it) is achievable, but may I remind you that some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest minds of his generations, said that the secret of intelligence would be unlocked within five years, and Alan Turing -- a component of your very own post-pre-AGI era's AG…
> and we are not even close to achieving insect-level intelligence. Aren't we close to this? Most insects only have a few million neurons in their central nervous system, so we can model their intelligence in real time at least. Maybe we still lack the tools for training such networks into useful configurations?
Neurons communicate with each other with a multitude of neurotransmitters and receptors [1]. As a cell, each neuron is a complex organism of its own that undergoes transcriptomic and metabolic changes. We aren't even close to simulating all protein interactions in a single cell yet, let alone in millions of them.
Of course you could say that full protein simulation of an entire brain is not neccessary if we can build an accurate enough technical model of a single neuron. In fact, already now we have to apply a model of how we believe proteins behave as "properly" simulating interactions of two proteins (or one with itself) with lattice QCD approaches is beyond our computational capabilities. For protein interaction we have pretty good models already. But finding a model of all types of neurons in insect brains is right now an open, unsolved challenge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmitter#List_of_neuro...