The argument became false as soon as we started reinforcement learning. Simple token-completion is arguably just simulating human behavior. Once you start training it on specific tasks you're training a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life.

> a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life.

hmm sounds like exact description of viruses, which, although not really alive, are part of/influence biological life for both good and bad. in fact humanity wouldn't be where it is if not for certain viruses.

it can be argued there is a lot of bacteria that is super goal seeking, and perhaps also very narrow minded, if minded at all. and this argument, the single-mided one, goes very far up the ladder of otherwise complex organisms.

unless we all are creationists, and God forgive me for expecting the whole game to be much more complex than just snapping humanity into existence, we can then say that trial and error is what drives evolution, and the idea of preserving life and procreation is veeery single-minded goal on its own.

As far as I know, none of these state of the art AIs have been trained on any specific task. It's as general as possible.