I don’t necessarily disagree with the first couple of claims. But I think the author pulls a sleight of hand to make their case (to be fair, I suspect they themselves didn’t realize they’re doing this).

- The first claim is that language is not intelligence.

I think this is true, but am not sure. However, for the sake of argument, let’s accept this as true.

However, this leads to the obvious objection stated by the author. General intelligence doesn’t need to work the same way as human intelligence does. The author counters this with their second claim.

- We have no evidence that a language based model can lead to intelligence.

For the sake of argument, let’s even accept this as true. But here’s where the sleight of hand comes in. Lack of evidence in X being true is not the same as evidence that X is false.

Just because we don’t have evidence that language can evolve into something like intelligence, doesn’t mean language cannot evolve into something like evidence.

And so far our experience in language evolving into something like intelligencr has been surprisingly positive.