Opinion: Neural Networks Can Never Produce Genuine Intelligence, Author Argues

A blogger on DEV Community has republished a piece originally posted in April 2026, arguing that genuine intelligence will never emerge from neural networks regardless of how much the technology scales. The author defines genuine intelligence as the ability to form new concepts from first principles, reason about unseen causal mechanisms, and operate as a unified, comprehending agent — capabilities they say an average 12-year-old already possesses. Drawing on a series of prior posts, the author contends that neural networks are fundamentally the wrong kind of system for producing such intelligence, describing this not as a fixable flaw but as an intrinsic property of what neural networks are. The piece also critiques current AI benchmarks, training practices, and the broader industry narrative around AI progress. The author frames the post as the culmination of a long-running argument developed across multiple earlier essays on language, mathematics, and the nature of intelligence.