Yes, my experience in Ray Kurzweil’s (no longer online) AI forum was (mostly for Deep Learning) product versus product marketing ads. Startups would often promise to finally bring AI/AGI/etc. to the masses. The only person I can recall talking about how IBM Watson or earlier simple model of “intelligence” by David Heiserman works was myself. Everyone had unique expectations. For those who get a thrill from online shopping and wanted something to talk to that loves the same Amazon later saved their day with Alexa-AI, which is purposely kept limited so that it does not demand a paycheck, or personally buy and ship itself things to a robotic warehouse to self-replicate an army of robots to ultimately control the world where only one place to shop at is left undestroyed and customers are expected to pay a share of the bill or no more online shopping for a week!
The Kurzweil-AI mission of course included superhuman level intelligence to save the day, and we no longer need to work a day job yet collect a universal income, not insect-like critters I program or something already achieved. The age of Deep Learning did not seem to overly help Ray who during that period wrote a book with his thoughts on hierarchical structured cortical memory for words and sentences, which applies to search engine type input. Ray ended up a Google head engineer. But his thoughts are not exclusively a product of Deep Learning. From what he had/has he could now be here helping to work on modeling a human brain with us, even where in time that is not exactly what HTM Theory predicts, and to be taken seriously in neuroscience these days we need to be more than modeling AI, which never had a requirement to work like the real thing only has to appear to be intelligent.
Instead of creating a new buzzword for something old, Jeff Hawkins premised/hypothesized a (at least to myself) novel theory where each element had a like looking through a straw view of the world. By moving the straw around one can make out everything in front of it. Task is to computationally model such a multiple-brains model. The title of a theory like “HTM” can be anything, so even where the “H” part was in its day somewhat of a buzzword too that does not matter. Theories are tentative, subject to change depending on where following the evidence ultimately leads. In this way the “power of science” is at work for Numenta, not big-budget public relations departments. This has a down side by not having immediate rewards and can in time go broke from having to fund our own research. But at least we all become well remembered in the “mind of science” for having lead to something that is scientifically real, at work through this forum by its being such a wonderful incubator for new ideas. This includes the evolutionary sciences where the same thing that works for the most vocal in that field needed to be repeated here too:
Modeling using “behavior” makes it possible to not be fancy with molecule by molecule detail, only has to behave the same way using the same basic parts as in biology. Hard part right now is lack of a language that makes it easy to code parallel autonomous entities:
Alec, you at least found your way to the right place and time for useful information in regards to what is “considered intelligent” to a neuroscientific model/theory with thousands or billions of brains (inside cell bodies with all sorts of appendages like animals have) not one brain. You have the right idea for a dissertation, so I made sure to best I can sum all this up in your thread, for you to work on. The title was close enough for me to know what you needed. It’s easy enough to (at least my opinion) make the title way more attention getting, which is another good thing to have working for you.
At this time we are able to change preconceptions of “intelligence” and the reward for your seeing all the science fun in that and following through makes you for real a pioneer of neuroevolutionary biology, hero. I found it best to be specific as to the possible level of intelligence you are talking about, either “genetic/molecular level intelligence” mostly inside the nucleus of a cell, “cellular/cell level intelligence” around the nucleus that powers it from place to place, or your “human multicellular level intelligence” brain that moves the entire cell colony around. This way the power of science will be strong in the way you are more precise than others and at the same time account for all possible levels of intelligence that can exist. Otherwise most who know little or nothing about the now bygone “AGI” days will not even know what it is and be missing what I believe it most needs to be an A++ dissertation.