Chollet: Programming and math training don't boost general intelligence

François Chollet compares AI progress to human learning, noting that 1980s research found programming training improves coding but does not transfer to general reasoning.

He argues general intelligence is a fundamental brain property rather than a trainable skill, since domain practice improves only that domain.

The post is framed as background for his question whether AI's jagged frontier, driven by math and code via RLVR, reflects general capability or continued human-data bottlenecks.