> Nobody is worshipping AI here

I assume that with «here» you mean HN. It may be that here the phenomenon is reduced, but signals have been present also on these pages. Outside of HN, may remind you of the engineer that cried "It's sentient!!!". That is just a variation of a general widespread phenomenon. Let me reconstruct the path of this part of the exchange: you mentioned a tendency in «downplaying», I tried to make you see that there is an attempt to "bring back on track" ideas, which you may take for downplaying, as a reaction to those who claimed e.g. that "we'd reached AGI". So, it's not off-topic, but an answer to your notes.

> pedantic ... We all know

It is not pedantic, but a definition of what different positions mean with 'intelligence' - also given that you write «We all know» but in the past months another topos has been "nobody knows". Definitions that are raised in order to discriminate debates for labelling different things. So: a thing that gives an output of "1000 has 5 digits" is not intelligent, because it has not checked. I know that it is not from those pieces of evidence - output we call, on the contrary, "unintelligent". And that is according to a valid definition of Intelligence, one that that I called «operationally []relevant»: i.e., you cannot trust a tool that returns such outputs.

For what 'intelligence' in 'Artificial Intelligence' is concerned, the operational purpose of AI is to create problem solvers that can replace professionals for some tasks: already there you need reliability. For 'Intelligence' in "actual proper Intelligence", in the sense that make you say that some people are "definitely intelligent", as per the previous paragraph, it appears that that is not an achieved goal for current technologies.
Both meanings are critical for operation.

So, when you write «you do not know if X is intelligent or not», I understand that you must be talking of some property that I would name differently.

> as does a human with brain damage

Very much not necessarily, according to what I call Intelligence. I do not call a random passer by "Intelligent" - only, maybe, "potentially intelligent". Do not forget that, given that we are in a broad context of AI, it is a normal perspective to assume an engineering point of view: an engineered tool will have to augment human capabilities. An implementation of Intelligence will have to be useful as such, as an Intelligent part - an actually, properly Intelligent part, not "just a living thing". This makes the perspective of things that "may have some intrinsic property that some may call a form of intelligence" - but does not constitute a usable Intelligence -, irrelevant (or as I wrote «operationally irrelevant»).

That there may be elements in the workings of some new NN structure that may develop elements of intelligence is good at the level of /research/. But on the level of product, for that to be called Intelligent this part demands:

_ that it has a world model which it progressively refines through critical revision. _

(Edit: and that our checks show that it works well, consistently.)

That is what we call Intelligence. Other forms of "potentially presumable" intelligence we call unimportant outside the studies.

And meanwhile, there is a phenomenon of actual misrepresentation of the whole matter ("the Overlord has come", etc.): that should be corrected.