I have been focused on ChatGPT and other generative AI also since last year. They are intelligent.
Hofstadter does seem to be possibly mistakenly assigning GPT-4 more animal characteristics than it really has, like a subjective stream of consciousness, but he is correct when he anticipates that these systems will shortly eclipse our intelligence.
No, GPT-4 does not have many characteristics of most animals, such as high bandwidth senses, detailed spatial-temporal world models, emotions, fast adaptation, survival instinct, etc. It isn't alive.
But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have intelligence.
We will continue to make these systems fully multimodal, more intelligent, more robust, much, much faster, and increasingly more animal-like.
Even with say another 30% improvement in the IQ and without any of the animalness, we must anticipate multimodal operations and vast increases in efficiency in the next 5-10 years for large models. When it can be operated continuously outputting and reasoning and acting at 50-100 times human speed and genius level, that is dangerous. Because it means that the only way for humans to compete is to deploy these models and let them make the decisions. Because interrupting them to figure out what the hell they are doing and try to direct them means your competitors race ahead the equivalent of weeks.
And researchers are focused on making more and more animal-like systems. This combined with hyperspeed and genius-level intelligence will definitely be dangerous.
Having said all of that, I also think that these technologies are the best hope that humanity has for significantly addressing our severe problems. But we will shortly be walking a fine line.