That doesn’t contradict what they said. We may one day design a biological computing system that is capable of it. We don’t entirely understand how neurons work; it’s reasonable to posit that the differences that many AGI boosters assert don’t matter do matter— just not in ways we’ve discovered yet.
I mentioned this in another thread, but I do wonder if we engineer a sort of biological computer, will it really be a computer at all, and not a new kind of life itself?
In my opinion, this is more a philosophical question than an engineering one. Is something alive because it’s conscious? Is it alive because it’s intelligent? Is a virus alive, or a bacteria, or an LLM?
The Allen Institute doesn’t seem to think so. We don’t even know how the brain of a roundworm ticks and it’s only got 302 neurons— all of which are mapped, along with their connections.
If you believe in eg a mind or soul then maybe it's possible we cannot make AGI.
But if we are purely biological then obviously it's possible to replicate that in principle.