Absolutely agreeing that true “intelligence” would come from such a synthesis - it also loosely matches what we know from cognitive psychology. We won’t go anywhere without rigorously addressing knowledge representation and reasoning - unlike humans, language is the only faculty ChatGPT possesses (and the power of language has been oversold for a while).

The cynic in me would rather have the backlash (and a rude awakening for the industry), than the looming hyper-normalization of convincing-sounding bullshit/plagiarism/etc (and new, more convoluted forms of “saying the magic words to make the algorithm behave”) in the near future.

(Relatedly: Say what you will about the rationalist community, they appear to have really thought about a lot of this.)