> The distinction Karpathy draws between "growing animals" and "summoning ghosts" via RLVR

I don't see these descriptions as very insightful.

The difference between general/animal intelligence and jagged/LLM intelligence is simply that humans/animals really ARE intelligent (the word was created to describe this human capability), while LLMs are just echoing narrow portions of the intelligent output of humans (those portions that are amenable to RLVR capture).

For an artificial intelligence to be intelligent in it's own right, and therefore be generally intelligent, it would need to need - like an animal - to be embodied (even if only virtually), autonomous, predicting the outcomes of it's own actions (not auto-regressively trained), learning incrementally and continually, built with innate traits like curiosity and boredom to put and keep itself in learning situations, etc.

Of course not all animals are generally intelligent - many (insects, fish, reptiles, many birds) just have narrow "hard coded" instinctual behaviors, but others like humans are generalists who evolution have therefore honed for adaptive lifetime learning and general intelligence.