We are indeed simulating what we find in nature when we create neural networks and transformers, and AI companies are indeed investing heavily in BCI research. ChatGPT can write an original essay better than most of my students. Its also artificial. Is that not artificial intelligence?
Hiding the training data behind gradient descent and then making attributions to the program that responds using this model is certainly artificial though.
This analogy just isn't holding water.
Chess computers surely must be intelligent, but then deep blue was „just search“.
Go computers surely must have intelligence because it requires intuition and search is intractable, but then it’s „just CNN based pattern matching“.
Writing essays surely requires intelligence, because of the creativity, but then it‘s actually just a „stochastic parrot“.
We keep attributing intelligence to what is currently out of reach even as this set is rapidly shrinking before out eyes.
It would be better to say that intelligence is an emergent phenomenon and that behavior that seems intelligent is intelligent.
There was also wide understanding that those architectures were trying to imitate small bits of what we understood was happening in the brain (see marvin minsky's perceptron etc). The hope was, as I understood it that there would be some breakthrough in neuroscience that would let the computer scientists pick up the torch and simulate what we find in nature.
None of that seems to be happening anymore and we're just interested in training enough to fool people.
"AI" companies investing in brain science would convince me otherwise. At this point they're just trying to come up with the next money printing machine.