> If we created intelligences and set them in competition with each other we may get something to evolve millions of years later.

Why millions of years? Do you agree or disagree that humans can develop technology faster than nature could evolve it on its own? It took maybe 70 years for computers to go from not existing, to matching humans on visual recognition tasks.

As you just acknowledged, it took nature at least billions of years to evolve humans. Is not focused technological development obviously orders of magnitude faster at evolving intelligence than nature? Does it not then follow that general intelligence is a lot closer than an argument based on natural evolution might imply?

What exactly is not logical about this argument?

It happened over billions of generations, and an AI generation can be millions of times shorter than a biological one. One of those is also shrinking rapidly.

Minor technical correction- it would be false to say that GI came from fungi as we humans have GI, but don't descend from fungi (we share a common ancestor) and likely haven't received the genes for GI (horizontal gene transfer) from them.

Personally I figure that once you have a complex enough system with feedback regulation and self-preservation, something like general intelligence occurs spontaneously through the normal mechanisms of evolution (probably more than once in different kingdoms) because it provides a heritable survival edge.

I never said we got those genes from them just that intelligence has been a slow grind to reach human beings.

I agree that the simplest properties of neural networks are an emergent property of multicellular life.