alt Hacker News> As long as there is a gap between AI and human learning, we do not have AGI.
Back in the 90's, Scientific American had an article on AI - I believe this was around the time Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess.
One AI researcher's quote stood out to me:
"It's silly to say airplanes don't fly because they don't flap their wings the way birds do."
He was saying this with regards to the Turing test, but I think the sentiment is equally valid here. Just because a human can do X and the LLM can't doesn't negate the LLM's "intelligence", any more than an LLM doing a task better than a human negates the human's intelligence.
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Or the classic from Dijkstra (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...):
> even Alan M. Turing allowed himself to be drawn into the discussion of the question whether computers can think. The question is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim.
(I am of the opinion that the thinking question is in fact a bit more relevant than the swimming one, but I understand where these are coming from.)
You know what the G stands for in AGI? General intelligence. You could measure a plane on general versatility in air and it would lose against a bird. You could also measure it against energy consumption. There are a lot of things you can measure a lot of them are pointless, a lot of articles on HN are pointless.
There are very valid reasons to measure that. You wouldn’t ask a plane to drive you to the neighbor or to buy you groceries at the supermarket. It’s not general mobile as you are, but it increases your mobility
For me the whole are we there yet wrt AGI is already dead, since the tools we've had for ~1.5 years are already incredibly useful for me. So I just don't care anymore. For some people we're already there. For other we'll never get there. Definitions change, goalposts move, etc. In the meantime we're already seeing ASI stuff coming (self improvement and so on).
But the arc-agi competitions are cool. Just to see where we stand, and have some months where the benchmarks aren't fully saturated. And, as someone else noted elswhere in the thread, some of these games are not exactly trivial, at least until you "get" the meta they're looking for.
It's unlikely that intelligence comes in only human flavor.
It also doesn't actually matter much, as ultimately the utility of it's outputs is what determines it's worth.
There is the moral question of consciousness though, a test for which it seems humans will not be able to solve in the near future, which morally leads to a default position that we should assume the AI is conscious until we can prove it's not. But man, people really, really hate that conclusion.
Something that surprises me about modern LLMs is that they're relatively smart yet lack consciousness. I used to believe that consciousness (e.g. a desire for self-preservation, intrinsic motivation) might be a necessary requirement for AGI/ASI, but it's increasingly looking like that may not be the case. If true, that's actually good news, since it makes the worst doomsday scenarios less likely.
Humans can do a lot of things that don't require intelligence. Artificial intelligence does not need to be 100% human to be AGI.
I think there's some third baseline standard, which most humans and some AI can meet to be considered "intelligent". A lot of humans are essentially p-zombies, so they wouldn't meet the standard either. Possibly all humans. Possibly me too.
Important to remember that intelligence is not a singular thing and when the last gap is closed, most aspects will be highly superhuman
So…calculators are intelligent? How about accountants that failed arithmetic 101 in high-school, are they intelligent? Generally intelligent?
All of flapping, flying and intelligence are physical actions. If your "flying" machine can't get up to altitude fast enough to avoid small hills then it's not an adequate flying system.
Despite so many claims an LLM has never done any interesting task better than a human. I could claim that cat is better than humans at writing text, but the non-specificity of my language here makes that statement simultaneously meaningless and incorrect. Another meaningless and incorrect (but less incorrect than most pro AI sttements) "git clone" is better at producing correct and feature rich c compiler code than $20,000 worth of Claude tokens.
The very obvious flaw with that argument is that flying is defined by, you know, moving in the air, whereas intelligence tends to be defined with the baseline of human intelligence. You can invent a new meaning, but it seems kind of dishonest
Except there's a much simpler definition of flying than of intelligence.
> As long as there is a gap between AI and human learning, we do not have AGI.
Don't read the statement as a human dunk on LLMs, or even as philosophy.
The gap is important because of its special and devastating economic consequences. When the gap becomes truly zero, all human knowledge work is replaceable. From there, with robots, its a short step to all work is replaceable.
What's worse, the condition is sufficient but not even necessary. Just as planes can fly without flapping, the economy can be destroyed without full AGI.