This is definitely an interesting way to look at it. My initial reaction is to consider that I can enhance the capabilities of a system without increasing its inteligence. For example, if I give a monkey a hammer, it can do more than it could do when it didn't have the hammer, but it is not more intelligent (though it could probably learn things by interacting with the world with the hammer). That leads me to think: can we enhance the capabilities of what we call "AI systems" to do these things, without increasing their intelligence? It seems like you can glue GPT-4o to some calendar APIs to do exactly this. This seems more like an issue of tooling rather than an issue of intelligence to me.
I guess the issue here is: can a system be "generally intelligent" if it doesn't have access to general tools to act on that intelligence? I think so, but I also can see how the line is very fuzzy between an AI system and the tools it can leverage, as really they both do information processing of some sort.
I'm sure some aspects of this can be achieved by manually programming GPT-4 links to other specific services. And obviously, some interaction tools would have to be written manually even for an AGI.
The difference though is the amount of work. Today if you wanted GPT-4 to work as I describe, you would have to write an integration for Gmail, another one for Office365, another one for Proton etc. You would probably have to create a management interface to give access to your auth tokens for each of these to OpenAI so they can activate these interactions. The person you want to sync with would have to do the same.
In contrast, an AGI that only has average human intelligence, or even below, would just need access to, say, Firefox APIs, and should easily be able to achieve all of this. And it would work regardless if the other side is a different AGI using a different provider, or even if they are just a regular human assistant.
I guess the issue here is: can a system be "generally intelligent" if it doesn't have access to general tools to act on that intelligence? I think so, but I also can see how the line is very fuzzy between an AI system and the tools it can leverage, as really they both do information processing of some sort.
Thanks for the insight.