How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on.

General intelligence is a strategy to defer the acquisition of abilities from the process of construction/blueprinting (ie., genes, evolution..) to the living environment of the animal. The most generally intelligent animals are those that have nearly all of their sensory motor skills acquired during their life -- we learn to walk and so can learn to play the piano, and to build a rocket.

There is a serious discontinuity in strategy to achive this defferal: the kinds of processes which "blueprint" the intelligence of a bacterium are discontinuous with the processes which a living animal needs to dynamically conceptualise its environment under shifts to its structure.

Of the latter animals need: living adaption of their sensory-motor systems, heirachical coordination of their bodies, robust causal modelling, and so on.

General intelligence is primitively a kind of movement, which becomes abstract only with a few hundred thousand years of culture. The earliest humans, able to lingusitically express almost nothing, were nevertheless generally intelligent.

Present computer-science-led investigations into "intelligence" assume you can operate syntactically across the most peripheral consequences of general intelligence given by linguistic representations. This is profoundly misguided: each todller necessarily must learn to walk. You cannot just project a slideshow of walking, and get anywhere. And if you remove this capability and install a "walking module", you've remved the very capabilities which allow that child then to do anything new at all.

There is nothing in the linguistic syntactical shadow of human intelligence to be found in creating generally capable systems. It's just overfitting to our 2024 reflections.

It's definity capable of human-level stupidity

Do you consider a basic algorithm to be artificial intelligence?

You are right though, you van go back further than LLMs and find misuses of the term "artificial intelligence." That doesn't contradict my main point though, that the word has been so redefined as to be pretty meaningless to the understanding of what intelligence is.

If we want to consider even basic algorithms to be intelligence, are we boiling down the entire concept of intelligence to mathematical equations?

You are probably thinking of Nature Communications. This article was posted on their more pop-science publishing site.

You aren't the first one mislead by the Nature brand btw - if you look into past submissions you will find similar comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nature.com

I continue to be dismayed by AI's quixotic focus on "human" intelligence. AI is very far from pigeon-level intelligence or dog-level intelligence. I strongly suspect transformers are dumber than spiders.[1] This focus on human intelligence via formal human knowledge is putting the cart before the horse. If your "human-level" AI architecture cannot conceivably be modified for chimp intelligence, and requires bootstrapping with a bunch of pre-processed human knowledge, then it is not actually emulating human intelligence. LLMs are fancy encyclopedias, not primitive brains.

[1] Suppose you have an accurate web-spinning simulator and you train a transformer ANN on 40 million years of natural spiderweb construction: between trees, rocks, etc. This AI is excellent at spinning natural webs. Would the transformer be able to spin a functional web in your pantry or basement. If not, then the AI isn't as smart as a spider. I don't think this thought experiment is actually possible: any computer simulation would excessively simplify the physical complexity. But based on transformers' pattern of failures in other domains, I don't think they are good enough to pull it off.