That’s why I had it that general intelligence is possible at the cat level. That said, it doesn’t seem too implausible that there’s a general intelligence threshold around human-level intelligence (not brain size), which raises the possibility that achieving general intelligence becomes substantially easier with human-scale brains (which is why evolution achieved it with us, rather than sooner or later).
This scenario is based on the Bitter Lesson model, in which size is far more important than the algorithm once a certain degree of generality in the algorithm is attained. If that is true in general, while evolution would be unlikely to hit on a maximally efficient algorithm, it might get within an order of magnitude of it.
That’s why I had it that general intelligence is possible at the cat level. That said, it doesn’t seem too implausible that there’s a general intelligence threshold around human-level intelligence (not brain size), which raises the possibility that achieving general intelligence becomes substantially easier with human-scale brains (which is why evolution achieved it with us, rather than sooner or later).
This scenario is based on the Bitter Lesson model, in which size is far more important than the algorithm once a certain degree of generality in the algorithm is attained. If that is true in general, while evolution would be unlikely to hit on a maximally efficient algorithm, it might get within an order of magnitude of it.