On the first article, if you believe that a human is smarter than a chimp, and a chimp is smarter than a snail, then it raises the question of whether entities smarter than humans are possible. I suppose it might be difficult to precisely define a concept of intelligence that matches our intuition that humans are smarter than chimps, who in turn are smarter than snails. But such difficulty just says something about how facile you are with defining concepts. It doesn't have any bearing on how things play out in the real world.

On the second point, who cares? If the first AGI draws gigawatts, it will still be an AGI.