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Clositoday at 11:13 AM4 repliesview on HN

Just comes down to your own view of what AGI is, as it's not particularly well defined.

While a bit 'time-machiney' - I think if you took an LLM of today and showed it to someone 20 years ago, most people would probably say AGI has been achieved. If someone wrote a definition of AGI 20 years ago, we would probably have met that.

We have certainly blasted past some science-fiction examples of AI like Agnes from The Twilight Zone, which 20 years ago looked a bit silly, and now looks like a remarkable prediction of LLMs.

By todays definition of AGI we haven't met it yet, but eventually it comes down to 'I know it if I see it' - the problem with this definition is that it is polluted by what people have already seen.


Replies

nottorptoday at 1:02 PM

> most people would probably say AGI has been achieved

Most people who took a look at a carefully crafted demo. I.e. the CEOs who keep pouring money down this hole.

If you actually use it you'll realize it's a tool, and not a particularly dependable tool unless you want to code what amounts to the React tutorial.

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andy99today at 4:22 PM

  I think if you took an LLM of today and showed it to someone 20 years ago, most people would probably say AGI has been achieved. 
I’ve got to disagree with this. All past pop-culture AI was sentient and self-motivated, it was human like in that it had it’s own goals and autonomy.

Current AI is a transcript generator. It can do smart stuff but it has no goals, it just responds with text when you prompt it. It feels like magic, even compared to 4-5 years ago, but it doesn’t feel like what was classically understood as AI, certainly by the public.

Somewhere marketers changed AGI to mean “does predefined tasks with human level accuracy” or the like. This is more like the definition of a good function approximator (how appropriate) instead of what people think (or thought) about when considering intelligence.

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bananaflagtoday at 11:23 AM

> If someone wrote a definition of AGI 20 years ago, we would probably have met that.

No, as long as people can do work that a robot cannot do, we don't have AGI. That was always, if not the definition, at least implied by the definition.

I don't know why the meme of AGI being not well defined has had such success over the past few years.

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sixtyjtoday at 1:04 PM

Charles Stross published Accelerando in 2005.

The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity.