I Don't Believe AGI Will Happen

With all the hype (and fear) about ChatGPT and existential threats caused by AI, I think it'd be good for society as a whole to take a step back and calmly analyse what AI are. No matter how advanced they are, they're just really big equations filled with matrix multiplication and non-linear activation functions. No matter how accurate they are, I don't think an equation can ever be called intelligent. I don't think an equation can even emulate intelligence that well. For an equation to be used to solve a problem, an intelligent agent has to actually decide that the equation can be used to solve the problem and then use a computer to do the calculations. I think that autonomy is an essential aspect of intelligence, which an equation will never emulate, much less have. I don't want to say that AI doesn't have the potential to be dangerous, especially in the hands of a bad actor, but I don't think we'll ever have to worry about one of the AI programs becoming sentient.