The human brain needs 80 billion neurons to hold 5-7 numbers in memory and add and multiply them. How can a MOS integrated circuit from 1965 with only 250 transistors possibly be turned into a faster and more capable arithmetic calculator when it is so woefully underpowered by comparison?

> "there is absolutely zero evidence indicating that we are any closer to AGI than what James Watt was to realizing nuclear fusion"

James Watt lived before Rutherford split the atom, he didn't know they could be split or fused, he was not trying for nuclear fusion. We do know that information exists and can be processed. Still, James Watt was closer to large scale controlled release of energy than humans before the control of fire.

We know that human level intelligence is possible, in a way that Watt didn't know fusion was possible. We have looked for other mechanisms hiding in the brain - Penrose and Hameroff's ideas of quantum tubules for one - and rejected them. We've pretty closely bounded the amount of energy a brain uses, what it can sense, how it can input and output, what it's made of, and through what mechanisms of electric pulses and neurotransmitters it seems likely to operate. We've identified brain regions which cause predictable effects when damaged (on language, memory, executive decision making). We've dissected it, photographed it, x-rayed it, imaged it in layers, imaged it while active.

We've represented facts as data, written code which uses genetic algorithms to solve problems, written code which writes code to solve problems, written code which crunches data in large quantities to pull out higher dimensional patterns, code which appears to identify concepts from that, code which does specialised tasks such as face recognition, language recognition, language generation, person recognition.

It's pretty indefensible to say "absolutely zero evidence indicating we are any closer than people of 10k BC, people of 0 AD, people of 1800, or people of 1900". You're basically doing the God of the gaps argument, as we map the brain physically in more and more detail, and encroach from the data an information processing side, the gap between them where intelligence could be hiding appears to be shrinking. But with no evidence or support, you suggest something else is hiding there which makes the gap a Jaunt so large that encroachment from either side is immeasurably tiny. And you hide it behind the "G" for general.

Twenty years ago you could talk to a nonsense chatbot. Ten-ish years ago you could talk to a somewhat coherent GPT. Five years ago you could talk to a surprisingly coherent ChatGPT. Today people collaborate with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, ask them to explain concepts, provide examples and get them to follow on, offload work to them, learn from them, have them proof read documents, have them rewrite in different styles.

I think Hofstadter said he wasn't interested in computers because they don't have concepts. Here's an article in the ACM last year saying similar: ""Neural networks can look at a picture and tell whether it contains a dog, a cat, or a car, but they do not have a rich understanding of any of those categories. Take the concept of a bridge. Humans can extend the notion of a bridge to abstract levels. We can talk about a bridge between people or bridging the gender gap. We can instantly understand what these expressions mean because we have a rich mental model of what a bridge can be."" - https://cacm.acm.org/news/artificial-intelligence-still-cant...

Asking ChatGPT:

Me: "Hi, a bridge is a big metal thing over a road or river;
what does it mean to "bridge the gender gap"?
Can you explain briefly, please?"

ChatGPT: "To "bridge the gender gap" means to reduce the differences
or inequalities between men and women, particularly in areas
like pay, opportunities, education, or representation.
It's about creating a more equal and fair situation where both
genders have the same access and opportunities. Just like a
physical bridge connects two places, "bridging the gender gap"
connects the unequal sides, making them more balanced."

Me: "Interesting; can you suggest other non-physical things
which could be "bridged" please?"

ChatGPT: "Certainly! Here are some examples of non-physical things that can be "bridged":

Cultural gap – Reducing misunderstandings or differences between people from different cultures.
Communication gap – Improving understanding between people who are having difficulty communicating.
Generation gap – Narrowing the differences in attitudes and perspectives between older and younger generations.
Wealth gap – Reducing economic inequality between rich and poor.
Knowledge gap – Closing the gap in access to information or education between different groups.
Digital divide – Bridging the gap between those who have access to technology and the internet and those who don’t.
Trust gap – Rebuilding or enhancing trust between individuals or groups, like companies and their customers.

In each case, "bridging" is about connecting or bringing closer
two sides that are separated by some form of difference or inequality.

Seems to have some grasp of the general concept of "bridging" more than Eliza or Eugene Goostman, doesn't it? "I have tried some letter-string problems in GPT-3, and in some cases it could solve them. It learned, for example, the concept of successorship. Not perfect, not robust, but I found it still surprising that it can do this. Therefore, I don't agree that these systems are only 'stochastic parrots', as some scientists have called them. I have seen evidence of GPT building simple internal models of situations."" says the expert in the article.

I'm not saying this is an AGI or will lead directly to AGI, but stubbornly refusing to accept this obvious progress as any progress towards machine intelligence at all, calling it "absolutely zero" evidence of progress seems wilfully blinkered.

Do you genuinely put us absolutely no closer, not a single step closer, to AGI than the Mechanical Turk or the people of 50k BC?