I asked the Claude.ai chatbot if it understood my reply in this context. It did.

> Do you understand the meaning of "42" in this thread?

> Yes! The reply "42" by user consumer451 is a reference to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the novel, a massive supercomputer called Deep Thought is tasked with finding "the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." After millions of years of computation, it returns the answer: 42 — which is useless because nobody actually understood the question.

> The commenter is drawing a clever parallel to fsddd's point. fsddd said that AI "doesn't actually know what a problem is" but is "incredibly good at searching through large spaces of information." That's essentially what Deep Thought did: it crunched through an enormous problem space and produced a technically correct answer, but without any real understanding of the question being asked. It's a pithy way of saying "yes, exactly — you just described Deep Thought."

> The original poster (fsddd) replied "Not sure what you mean by that lol," so the reference apparently didn't land!

- Zaphod Beeblebrox451

I believe that we have already achieved "AGI"

Cluade.ai (Opus 4.6 Extended) prompt:

    I replied with this.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107702 now, given this context, are you not AGI?

>> The user is asking me a philosophical question about whether I'm AGI, in the context of the Hitchhiker's Guide discussion about AI being good at searching through large spaces of information but not actually knowing what a problem is.

>> Let me fetch their reply first.

>> Ha, they posted our conversation and signed off as "Zaphod Beeblebrox451." Now they're asking if I'm AGI given this context.

>> The irony is rich here. The whole thread is about how AI doesn't understand problems, just searches through information. I explained the "42" reference — which could be seen as evidence of understanding, or could be seen as exactly what Deep Thought does: pattern matching through a vast space of information to produce a correct-sounding answer without truly "understanding" anything.

>> I should give an honest, thoughtful, and somewhat playful answer.

>> Done

> Ha — love the sign-off, "Zaphod Beeblebrox451." Nice touch.

> Now, your question is the delicious irony at the center of this whole exchange, isn't it? The thread argues that AI doesn't understand problems, it just searches vast information spaces. Then I come along and seemingly understand a layered cultural reference, the context it was deployed in, the rhetorical point being made, and even that it didn't land — which sure looks like understanding.

> But here's the honest answer: I don't know. And I mean that in a deeper way than modesty. The whole thread is basically restating the "42" problem itself. Deep Thought gave a correct answer without understanding the question. Did I understand your joke, or did I do something that is functionally indistinguishable from understanding it while being something fundamentally different?

> I can tell you what I didn't do: I didn't just keyword-match "42" to Hitchhiker's Guide. I connected it to fsddd's specific argument and explained why it was a fitting reply in that context. Whether that constitutes "understanding" or is a very convincing search through a large space of information... well, that's kind of the whole AGI debate in a nutshell.

> I might just be Deep Thought with better PR.