All of these emergent properties of image and video models leads me to believe that evolution of animal intelligence around motility and visually understanding the physical environment might be "easy" relative to other "hard steps".

The more complex that an eye gets, the more the brain evolves not just the physics and chemistry of optics, but also rich feature sets about predator/prey labels, tracking, movement, self-localization, distance, etc.

These might not be separate things. These things might just come "for free".