When we think about human accomplishments, we like to think that they all happened because of our intelligence. We are pretty smart, right? A single human can solve complicated differential equations or persuade armies to march on a capital. But I'd argue that our ability to do all of these things doesn't come directly from our minds, but from the systems our minds are organized in.
A single human dropped into the middle of the Amazon jungle can't do all that much. Sure, they can maybe build a shelter and live to old age, but they aren't going to build a particle accelerator. Drop the same human into a modern democratic society, however, and they can accomplish much more. A human in a vacuum is not that capable, but give that human access to tools and systems that allow them to specialize and avoid worrying about food and water, and they can do much more. I think this is a more general concept.
You could imagine that humans were much less intelligent. You could argue that less-intelligent humans would not be able to build the systems we have today, so instead assume that we replace every human on Earth with someone half as intelligent. What happens? Well, I'd imagine some things stop working. Maybe GDP goes down and some universities shut down, but would things still function at all? Could we design a better system that has twice as many people but the same output as today's civilization? We could imagine focusing much more time on education. Everyone does slightly less at their job, but there are more people on the job. We would also likely need some organizational changes or technology to keep things moving smoothly.
Whenever large numbers of humans work together, there is some organizational system that they participate in to hold things together. For most countries, this is a government with a political system. A company has an organizational chart and an operations team that facilitate how people communicate with each other. We will call these systems "orchestrators." These orchestrators are mechanisms for extracting more intelligence from individual humans. Two humans working together are not smarter than one unless they have a good plan for communication and can divide up work efficiently. The same is true of hundreds of people. That is why we need these larger organizational systems.
Now, instead of just considering humans, let's consider using AI. AIs are currently much less capable than humans. But can we create an AI orchestrator to build something much more capable? I think this will be how AGI is created. We will create AI "companies" with optimal organizational structures that multiply the power of a single GPT.