While I agree about the conflict of interest, I would largely say the same thing despite no such conflict of interest. However I see intelligence as a modular and many dimensional concept. If it scales as anticipated, it will still need to be organized into different forms of informational or computational flow for anything resembling an actively intelligent system.
On that note, the recent developments with active inference like RXinfer are astonishing given the current level of attention being paid. Seeing how llms are being treated, I’m almost glad it’s not being absorbed into the hype and hate cycle.
I see intelligence as filling areas of concept space within an econiche in a way that proves functional for actions within that space. I think we are discovering more that “nature” has little commitment, and is just optimizing preparedness for expected levels of entropy within the functional eco-niche.
Most people haven’t even started paying attention to distributed systems building shared enactive models, but they are already capable of things that should be considered groundbreaking considering the time and finances of development.
That being said, localized narrow generative models are just building large individual models of predictive process that doesn’t by default actively update information.
People who attack AI for just being prediction machines really need to look into predictive processing, or learn how much we organics just guess and confabulate ontop of vestigial social priors.
But no, corpos are using it so computer bad human good, even though the main issue here is the humans that have unlimited power and are encouraged into bad actions due to flawed social posturing systems and the confabulating of wealth with competency.