If we're calling out names, what about Roger Penrose, John Searle, Stuart Hameroff, Hubert Dreyfus, Henry Stapp? These are very intelligent people and I suggest to get acquainted with their work. Neural scaling laws are real and no matter if you put into training 10e-8 petaFLOP/days of compute or 200000 petaFLOP/days you will hit irreducible error constant at Efficient Compute Frontier.
I'm not a functionalist and my belief is that AI — especially LLMs — will never achieve real understanding or consciousness, no matter how much we scale them. Language prediction is just a computation, but human thought is more than that.
Calling out names was an argument just for not dismissing AI as a thing "everyone knows" is fake.
Above you wrote "we all know the only real Intelligence ... is" as your support for attributing venial motives to people taking AI progress seriously. OK, now I know your basis for that claim. I've read three of the guys you mention, agree they're intelligent and except for Searle have some good things to say. But it's really unconvincing as support for an AI-is-fake claim, and especially for an everyone-knows claim.
I'm not a functionalist and my belief is that AI — especially LLMs — will never achieve real understanding or consciousness, no matter how much we scale them. Language prediction is just a computation, but human thought is more than that.