I suppose one argument could be: Humans are a kind of general intelligence. Humans tend to make this mistake. So making this mistake doesn’t show that we are far away from human-level intelligence.
If anything, this seems to be evidence for a third position, rather for either scale is all you need or language models being really unimpressive.
I thought this was a really important point, although I might be biased because I was finding it confusing how some discussions were talking about the gradient landscape as though it could be modified and not clarifying the source of this (for example, whether they were discussing reinforcement learning).