The speaker characterizes intention-following as an ultimate form of generalization: a model can adaptively pursue an intention according to its own interpretation of it.

“Or now the important thing with this reward seeking thing,”

“this is a nice segue onto the agency,”

“is you can give a model an intention and that is like the ultimate form of generalisation because the model can now adaptively work towards an intention with its own interpretation of that intention. So you see we're just kind of walking up the abstraction mountain, to coin a phrase.”