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Ok, I’ll give you the lightbulb point :).

But we can hardly define intelligence, let alone “entirely understand” it. A child could give a good , practical definition of fire and manipulate it skillfully thousands of years ago. Not so much us grown adults wrt intelligence today.

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Here is a child-like, practical definition of intelligence: "ability to solve problems".

That’s a good start, but doesn’t help us since even the most basic programs can fit that definition and are not what we mean when we say AGI. I have yet to see anything approaching a useful definition of intelligence across several discussions of impressive new language, and other statistical models - it feels like we should have that before talking about making it real!

With fire, even “when things turn from themselves to ashes and produce heat” (which I imagine a prehistoric child could come up with) distinguishes fire usefully from most other phenomena in the world

You are equivocating throughout this thread: you accept that we developed an understanding of fire incrementally, and concurrently developed fire-based technologies, yet you insist it is different for intelligence, without giving any good reason to think so.

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