That’s one giant leap you got there.
That the probably that intelligent life exists in the universe is 1, says nothing about that ease, or otherwise, with which it came about.
By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.
Or, what did you mean by easy?
We know how long it took. We have a good idea when life started, and for almost all its history, it was single-cellular. Multi-cellular life is relatively fresh, and on evolutionary time scales, the progression from first eukaryotes to something resembling a basic nervous systems to basic brains to humans, was fairly quick. We have many examples of animals alive today from every part of the progression, and we know they actively use it. We know how natural selection works, that it makes small moves, and that each increment has to be net non-negative in terms of fitness (at least averaging out over populations) - otherwise it would die out instead of accumulating.
All that adds up to, yes, it's surprising evolution stumbled on our level of intelligence so easily.
If you’re going to get about claiming to know how evolution works, at least know how evolution works:
Relative to all non-humans.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone can get a dog to (technically) pass a GCSE (British highschool) exam (not full subject just exam) for a language other than English, because one learned a thousand words and that might just technically be enough fot a British student to pass a French GCSE listening test.
But nobody sane ever hired a non human animal to solve a problem that humans consider intellectually challenging.
Indeed, it would be very surprising if multiple species had exactly the same intelligence. It's more likely there this variable samples some distribution. Of course the species at the top can set the threshold so that all other species don't meet it, if they feel like declaring themselves uniquely intelligent. But that's not very useful.
> Driving is still an example of a case where humans hold the peak performance.
Other great apes can drive too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY
I think it's very hard to look at this video and not recognize that orangutans are intelligent
As can dogs. However, I said "peak".
Then again, whatever process we're using, evolution found it in the solution space, using even more constrained search than we did, in that every intermediary step had to be non-negative on the margin in terms of organism survival. Yet find it did, so one has to wonder: if it was so easy for a blind, greedy optimizer to random-walk into human intelligence, perhaps there are attractors in this solution space. If that's the case, then LLMs may be approximating more than merely outcomes - perhaps the process, too.