I've followed the human level intelligence stuff for about 45 years, back before it was called AGI and the basic thesis is kind of anti religious. It's that human intelligence is basically the result of a biologically constructed computing device, not some god given spirit, and as human built computing devices continue their Moore's law like progression they will overtake at some point.
It's been true and kind of inevitable since Turing et all started talking about it in the 1950s and Crick and Watson discovered the DNA basis of life. It's not religious, not a mania, not far fetched.
The angle currently is the opposite. They're positing that the machine has some sort of spirit - see the other poster talking about "unexplained emergent intelligence".
Saying we don’t understand why LLMs are intelligent is both true and completely unrelated to religion. You inserted the word “spirit” so perhaps you are the one conflating the two.
Well it's sort of true in that people stick these LLMs together and they produce intelligent seeming outputs in ways that the people building them don't fully understand. Kind of like how evolution stuck a bunch of biological neurons together without needing to fully understand how it works.
It's been true and kind of inevitable since Turing et all started talking about it in the 1950s and Crick and Watson discovered the DNA basis of life. It's not religious, not a mania, not far fetched.