> A plant could not bite and chew another plant, because, like the fungal cells, the plant cells have abandoned their ancestral animal-like mobility

I would think capabilities like that would be recoverable, if the biological economics worked.

But your point that parasitical plants continuously live off other plants, i.e. they essentially farm them, resolves that. Given victim plants can't run away, their metabolisms are worth far more than any one-time resource extraction.

> We have had full AGI for years now

Models still have extreme limits relative to humans. Context size and reasoning depths, being the two most obvious. A third being their inability to incorporate new information with as little effort as humans do, without creating unintended conflicts across previously learned information.

But they vastly exceed human capabilities in other ways. The most obvious, being their ability to do shallow reasoning incorporating information from virtually any combination out of the vast number of topics that humans find useful or interesting. Another being their ability to by default produce discourse with such high written organization and grammatical quality.

For now, they are artificial "better at different things" intelligences.

I would have thought that plants which ate neighboring plants, for their easily accessed nutrients and to protect their own access to sunlight, water and forest nutrients, would be pervasive.

I have heard of chemical/strangling/parasitical type competition. The banyan tree is territorial, for instance.

But we would need another name, other than territorial, carnivorous or vegetarian, to describe plant predators which overtly, actively fed on the physical structure or leaves of fellow plants.

The third is to challenge students. With unusual concepts, preferably.

How else to create students capable of solving problems we cannot anticipate today?

Not to mention, that understanding strange problems is a very efficient way to broaden horizons.

You mean the unqualified people he specifically put in place because they are malleable toward operating like he wants them to, expendable if they don’t?

Senile or not, he is most definitely in charge of the chaos.