5 ms·

> Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now. why is that surprising? nobody really agrees on what the threshold for AGI i

> Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now. why is that surprising? nobody really agrees on what the threshold for AGI is, and if you break it down: is it artificial? yes. is it general? yes. you can ask it questions across almost any domain. is it intelligent? yes. like people say things like "my dog is intelligent" (rightly so). well is chatgpt more intelligent than a dog? yeah. hell it might give many undergrads a run for their money. a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.

skydhash 1y ago
Can it do stuff? Yes Can it do stuff I need? Maybe Does it always do the stuff I need? No Pick your pair of question and answer.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  humans are intelligent and most definitely are nowhere close to doing #3 some intelligent humans fail at #2.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Which is why we have checklist and process that get us to #3. And we automate some of them to further reduce the chance of errors. The nice thing about automation is that you can just prove that it works once and you don't need to care that much after (deterministic process).
goatlover 1y ago
> a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes. Or disagreeing with your definition. AGI would need to be human-level across the board, not just chat bots. That includes robotics. Manipulating the real world is even more important for "human-level" intelligence than generating convincing and useful content. Also, there are still plenty of developers who don't think the LLMs are good enough to replace programmers yet. So not quite AGI. And the last 10% of solving a problem tends to be the hardest and takes the longest time.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  did you miss the "homocentrism" part of my comment?
- landryraccoon 1y ago
  That's moving the goalposts. ChatGPT would easily have passed any test in 1995 that programmers / philosophers would have set for AGI at that time. There was definitely no assumption that a computer would need to equal humans in manual dexterity tests to be considered intelligent. We've basically redefined AGI in a human centric way so that we don't have to say ChatGPT is AGI.
  - pegasus 1y ago
    Any test?? It's failing plenty of tests not of intelligence, but of... let's call it not-entirely-dumbness. Like counting letters in words. Frontier models (like Gemini 2.5 pro) are frequently producing answers where one sentence is directly contradicted by another sentence in the same response. Also check out the ARC suite of problems easily solved by most humans but difficult for LLMs.
    - throwawaymaths 1y ago
      yeah but a lot of those failures fail because of underlying architecture issues. this would be like a bee saying "ha ha a human is not intelligent" because a human would fail to perceive uv patterns on plant petals.
      - pegasus 1y ago
        The letter-counting, possibly could be excused on this ground. But not the other instances.
  - goatlover 1y ago
    That's just not true. Star Trek Data was understood in the 90s to be a good science fiction example of what an AGI (known as Strong AI back then) could do. HAL was even older one. Then Skynet with it's army of terminators. The thing they all had common was the ability to manipulate the world as well or better than humans. The holodeck also existed as a well known science fiction example, and people did not consider the holodeck computer to be a good example of AGI despite how good it was at generating 3D worlds for the Star Trek crew.
ceres 1y ago
Okay this is kinda random and maybe off topic but can someone please explain? When I tell an LLM to count to 10 with a 2 second pause between each count all it does is generate Python code with a sleep function. Why is that? A 3 year old can understand that question and follow those instructions. An LLM doesn’t have an innate understanding of time it seems. Can we really call it AGI if that’s the case? That’s just one example.
- pegasus 1y ago
  That's because you used a LLM trained to produce text, but you asked it to produce actions, not just text. An agentic model would be able to do it, precisely by running that Python code. Someone could argue that a 3 year old does exactly that (produces a plan, then executes it). But these models have deeper issues of lack of comprehension and logical consistency, which prevents us (thankfully) from being able to completely remove the necessity of a man-in-the-middle who keeps an eye on things.
- schoen 1y ago
  It seems right that LLMs don't have an innate understanding of time, although you could analogize what you did with writing someone a letter and saying "please count to ten with a two-second pause between numbers". When you get a letter back in the mail, it presumably won't contain any visible pauses either.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  just because it doesn't do what you tell it to doesn't mean it's not intelligent. i would say doing something that gets you where you want when it knows? it can't do exactly what you asked for (because architecurally it's impossible) could be a sign of pretty intelligent sideways thinking!!? dare i say it displays a level of self awareness that i would not have expected.
sshine 1y ago
While you can say that LLMs have each of A, G and I, you may argue that AGI is A·G·I and what we see is A+G+I. It is each of those things in isolation, but there is more to intelligence. We try to address the missing part as agency and self-improvement. While we can put the bar arbitrarily high for homocentric reasons, we can also try to break down what layers of intelligence there are between Singularity Overlord (peak AGI) and Superintelligent Labrador On Acid (what we have now). Kind of like what complexity theorists do between P and NP.
pegasus 1y ago
Sure, I've been pointing out that literal sense myself, but to be fair, that's not what people mean by AGI. They mean real understanding, which is clearly missing. You just have to dig a bit deeper to realize that. One example is contradictory sentences in the same breath. Just last week I was asking Gemini 2.5 how I can see my wifi password on my iphone and it said that it's not possible and to do it I have to [...proceeding to correctly explain how to get it]. It's pretty telling, and no amount of phd-level problem solving can push this kind of stuff under the rug.
- highfrequency 1y ago
  "Nothing dumb anywhere" is an unreasonably high bar for AGI. Even Isaac Newton spent 1/3 of his career trying to predict future events from reading the Bible. Not to mention all the insane ego-driven decisions like Hamilton's voluntary duel with Burr. Sure, Gemini may spit out obviously self-contradictory answers 2% of the time. How does that compare to even the brightest humans? People slip up all the time.
  - codr7 1y ago
    It's not slipping up, it's guessing the wrong answer. I'd be prepared to argue that most humans aren't guessing most of the time.
    - timschmidt 1y ago
      > I'd be prepared to argue that most humans aren't guessing most of the time. Research suggests otherwise[1]. Action seems largely based on intuition or other non-verbal processes in the brain with rationalization happening post-hoc. I've figured for an age that this is because consciously reasoning through anything using language as a tool takes time. Whereas survival requires me to react to the attacking tiger immediately. https://skepticink.com/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rationalisation-reasoning-our-intuition-and-changing-our-minds/ https://skepticink.com/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rational...
      - 1y ago
artninja1988 1y ago
It's definitely not agi in my book because I'm not yet completely economically redundant.
- jstanley 1y ago
  By that standard, humans aren't generally intelligent because you're still not economically redundant?
geon 1y ago
I’d say it is not intelligent. At all. Not capable of any reasoning, understanding or problem solving. A dog is vastly more intelligent than the most capable current ai. The output sometimes looks intelligent, but it can just as well be complete nonsense. I don’t believe llms have much more potential for improvement either. Something else entirely is needed.

skydhash 1y ago

Can it do stuff? Yes Can it do stuff I need? Maybe Does it always do the stuff I need? No Pick your pair of question and answer.

throwawaymaths 1y ago
humans are intelligent and most definitely are nowhere close to doing #3 some intelligent humans fail at #2.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Which is why we have checklist and process that get us to #3. And we automate some of them to further reduce the chance of errors. The nice thing about automation is that you can just prove that it works once and you don't need to care that much after (deterministic process).

goatlover 1y ago

> a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes. Or disagreeing with your definition. AGI would need to be human-level across the board, not just chat bots. That includes robotics. Manipulating the real world is even more important for "human-level" intelligence than generating convincing and useful content. Also, there are still plenty of developers who don't think the LLMs are good enough to replace programmers yet. So not quite AGI. And the last 10% of solving a problem tends to be the hardest and takes the longest time.

throwawaymaths 1y ago
did you miss the "homocentrism" part of my comment?
landryraccoon 1y ago
That's moving the goalposts. ChatGPT would easily have passed any test in 1995 that programmers / philosophers would have set for AGI at that time. There was definitely no assumption that a computer would need to equal humans in manual dexterity tests to be considered intelligent. We've basically redefined AGI in a human centric way so that we don't have to say ChatGPT is AGI.
- pegasus 1y ago
  Any test?? It's failing plenty of tests not of intelligence, but of... let's call it not-entirely-dumbness. Like counting letters in words. Frontier models (like Gemini 2.5 pro) are frequently producing answers where one sentence is directly contradicted by another sentence in the same response. Also check out the ARC suite of problems easily solved by most humans but difficult for LLMs.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    yeah but a lot of those failures fail because of underlying architecture issues. this would be like a bee saying "ha ha a human is not intelligent" because a human would fail to perceive uv patterns on plant petals.
    - pegasus 1y ago
      The letter-counting, possibly could be excused on this ground. But not the other instances.
- goatlover 1y ago
  That's just not true. Star Trek Data was understood in the 90s to be a good science fiction example of what an AGI (known as Strong AI back then) could do. HAL was even older one. Then Skynet with it's army of terminators. The thing they all had common was the ability to manipulate the world as well or better than humans. The holodeck also existed as a well known science fiction example, and people did not consider the holodeck computer to be a good example of AGI despite how good it was at generating 3D worlds for the Star Trek crew.

ceres 1y ago

Okay this is kinda random and maybe off topic but can someone please explain? When I tell an LLM to count to 10 with a 2 second pause between each count all it does is generate Python code with a sleep function. Why is that? A 3 year old can understand that question and follow those instructions. An LLM doesn’t have an innate understanding of time it seems. Can we really call it AGI if that’s the case? That’s just one example.

pegasus 1y ago
That's because you used a LLM trained to produce text, but you asked it to produce actions, not just text. An agentic model would be able to do it, precisely by running that Python code. Someone could argue that a 3 year old does exactly that (produces a plan, then executes it). But these models have deeper issues of lack of comprehension and logical consistency, which prevents us (thankfully) from being able to completely remove the necessity of a man-in-the-middle who keeps an eye on things.
schoen 1y ago
It seems right that LLMs don't have an innate understanding of time, although you could analogize what you did with writing someone a letter and saying "please count to ten with a two-second pause between numbers". When you get a letter back in the mail, it presumably won't contain any visible pauses either.
throwawaymaths 1y ago
just because it doesn't do what you tell it to doesn't mean it's not intelligent. i would say doing something that gets you where you want when it knows? it can't do exactly what you asked for (because architecurally it's impossible) could be a sign of pretty intelligent sideways thinking!!? dare i say it displays a level of self awareness that i would not have expected.

sshine 1y ago

While you can say that LLMs have each of A, G and I, you may argue that AGI is A·G·I and what we see is A+G+I. It is each of those things in isolation, but there is more to intelligence. We try to address the missing part as agency and self-improvement. While we can put the bar arbitrarily high for homocentric reasons, we can also try to break down what layers of intelligence there are between Singularity Overlord (peak AGI) and Superintelligent Labrador On Acid (what we have now). Kind of like what complexity theorists do between P and NP.

pegasus 1y ago

Sure, I've been pointing out that literal sense myself, but to be fair, that's not what people mean by AGI. They mean real understanding, which is clearly missing. You just have to dig a bit deeper to realize that. One example is contradictory sentences in the same breath. Just last week I was asking Gemini 2.5 how I can see my wifi password on my iphone and it said that it's not possible and to do it I have to [...proceeding to correctly explain how to get it]. It's pretty telling, and no amount of phd-level problem solving can push this kind of stuff under the rug.

highfrequency 1y ago
"Nothing dumb anywhere" is an unreasonably high bar for AGI. Even Isaac Newton spent 1/3 of his career trying to predict future events from reading the Bible. Not to mention all the insane ego-driven decisions like Hamilton's voluntary duel with Burr. Sure, Gemini may spit out obviously self-contradictory answers 2% of the time. How does that compare to even the brightest humans? People slip up all the time.
- codr7 1y ago
  It's not slipping up, it's guessing the wrong answer. I'd be prepared to argue that most humans aren't guessing most of the time.
  - timschmidt 1y ago
    > I'd be prepared to argue that most humans aren't guessing most of the time. Research suggests otherwise[1]. Action seems largely based on intuition or other non-verbal processes in the brain with rationalization happening post-hoc. I've figured for an age that this is because consciously reasoning through anything using language as a tool takes time. Whereas survival requires me to react to the attacking tiger immediately. https://skepticink.com/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rationalisation-reasoning-our-intuition-and-changing-our-minds/ https://skepticink.com/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rational...
    - 1y ago

artninja1988 1y ago

It's definitely not agi in my book because I'm not yet completely economically redundant.

jstanley 1y ago
By that standard, humans aren't generally intelligent because you're still not economically redundant?

geon 1y ago

I’d say it is not intelligent. At all. Not capable of any reasoning, understanding or problem solving. A dog is vastly more intelligent than the most capable current ai. The output sometimes looks intelligent, but it can just as well be complete nonsense. I don’t believe llms have much more potential for improvement either. Something else entirely is needed.