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I don't think you're giving him enough credit. Before he was known as the "doom" guy, he was known as the "short timelines" guy. The reason that we are now arguing about doom is because it is increasingly clear that timelines are in fact short. His conceptualization of intelligence as generalized reasoning power also seems to jive with the observed rapid capability gains in GPT models. The fact that next-token prediction generalized to coding skill, among myriads of other capabilities, would seem to be evidence in favor of this view.
2010, to be precise.
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Eh. I gave him some respect back when he was simply arguing that timelines could be short and the consequences of being wrong could be disastrous, so we should be spending more resources on alignment. This was a correct if not particularly hard argument to make (note that he certainly was not the one who invented AI Safety, despite his hallucinatory claim in "List of Lethalities"), but he did a good job popularizing it.
Then he wrote his April Fool's post and it's all been downhill from here. Now he's an utter embarrassment, and frankly I try my best not to talk about him for the same reason I'd prefer that media outlets stop naming school shooters. The less exposure he gets, the better off we all are.
BTW, as for his "conceptualization of intelligence", it went beyond the tautological "generalized reasoning power" that is, um, kind of the definition. He strongly pushed the Orthogonality Hypothesis (one layer of the tower of assumptions his vision of the future is based around), which is that the space of possible intelligences is vast and AGIs are likely to be completely alien to us, with no hope of mutual understanding. Which is at least a non-trivial claim, but is not doing so hot in the age of LLMs.
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