Por que no los dos?

I can see both sides:

Super humbling because nature’s complexity can provide data storage and retrieval capacity several orders or magnitude greater than the best we can do right now.

Also super exciting because look at what every brain on the planet is composed of, and how it functions, in a freakin’ square millimeter!

Crazy stuff. Wild.

Back in the early 2000s CERN was able to simulate the brain of a flat worm. Actually simulate the individual neurons firing. A 100% digital representation of a flatworm brain. And it took up an immense amount of processing capacity for a form of life that basic, far more processor intensive than the most advanced AIs we currently have.

Modern AIs don’t bother to simulate brains, they do something completely different. So you really can’t compare them to anything organic.

but it isn’t so clear cut

It’s demonstrably several orders of magnitude less complex. That’s mathematically clear cut.

Where is the cutoff on complexity required?

Philosophical question without an answer - We do know that it’s nowhere near the complexity of the brain.

both our brains and most complex AI are pretty much black boxes.

There are many things we cannot directly interrogate which we can still describe.

It’s impossible to say this system we know vanishingly little about is/isn’t dundamentally the same as this system we know vanishingly little about, just on a differentscale

It’s entirely possible to say that because we know the fundamental structures of each, even if we don’t map the entirety of eithers complexity. We know they’re fundamentally different - Their basic behaviors are fundamentally different. That’s what fundamentals are.

The first AGI will likely still have most people saying the same things about it, “it isn’t complex enough to approach a human brain.”

Speculation but entirely possible. We’re nowhere near that though. There’s nothing even approaching intelligence in LLMs. We’ve never seen emergent behavior or evidence of an id or ego. There’s no ongoing thought processes, no rationality - because that’s not what an LLM is. An LLM is a static model of raw text inputs and the statistical association thereof. Any “knowledge” encoded in an LLM exists entirely in the encoding - It cannot and will not ever generate anything that wasn’t programmed into it.

It’s possible that an LLM might represent a single, tiny, module of AGI in the future. But that module will be no more the AGI itself than you are your cerebellum.

But it doesn’t need to equal a brain to still be intelligent.

First thing I think we agree on.

LLM’s work on multi-dimensional search spaces

You’re missing half of it. The data cube is just for storing and finding weights. Those weights are then loaded into the nodes of a neural network to do the actual work. The neural network was inspired by actual brains.

I mean you can model a neuronal activation numerically, and in that sense human brains are remarkably similar to hyper dimensional spatial computing devices. They’re arguably higher dimensional since they don’t just integrate over strength of input but physical space and time as well.