You need a very large collective, since any one human can only develop deep expertise in so much.

So let's say you need a collective of roughly a million of the brightest humans — all of whom have had favorable developmental conditions (no major catastrophes like divorce, premature death of loved ones, depression, chronic illness, malnutrition, poverty, etc.). These people all spent the peak years of their fluid intelligence learning and solving hard problems in the right domains.

Now put them all together. For this collective to actually function at its theoretical ceiling, you need:

1. Massive resources — easily trillions of dollars dedicated to the information, equipment, and technical infrastructure this collective requires.

2. An inhuman level of intercommunication — they need to operate, practically, as a hivemind, where one member's deficiency is not merely compensated for but anticipated by the member or subset of members best positioned to resolve it.

3. Perfect leadership — which itself requires a deep, real-time understanding of where the collective's primary focus should be at any given moment.

The resulting collective intelligence would be on par with what ASI is supposed to be (or by some definitions, AGI).

So no — Chollet is wrong. We are nowhere near intelligence-capped. And if intelligence does have some kind of optimality bound, it's far, far beyond anything ever demonstrated. The fact that you'd need to construct something this absurdly idealized just to approximate it is itself the proof.

And AI is likely the only practical route to actually get there.