Thanks Tristan, for your comment and apologies for my late reply.

I appreciated your well thought out points, in particular that: "there are fundamental limits to the possibility of adequately emulating complex systems (including humans), regardless of whether we understand them more or not."

This may indeed be the case. To be frank, I guess the best I can say is that I honestly don't know haha.

As for your other point that, "i'm unsure how important it is to be able to accurately model human intelligence. Perhaps modelling some approximate of human intelligence (in the way that chatGPT is approximately good enough as a written chat bot) is sufficient enough."

I think I'm in agreement with you here. It doesn't really matter what flavor the intelligence happens to take. I think what really matters is whether or not it is powerful enough to outperform human intelligence. And ChatGPT and other AI models have definitely shown they can in a variety of fields.

Admittedly, since writing this, I've found my interests move away from AI Safety and to other areas, such as Buddhism and mindfulness. Maybe I'll find myself back in AI safety in the future, who knows haha.

Anyways, thanks again for your thoughtful comment! :)