8 ms·

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. > Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products ar

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. > Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails. Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?

outside1234 1y ago
No, but OpenAI is going to look for any opportunity to do it so they can end the contract with Microsoft.
- whynotminot 1y ago
  Why would you say that when this very contract appears to extend the arrangement almost indefinitely
shaky-carrousel 1y ago
AGI as a PR stunt for OpenAI is becoming a meme.
- codyb 1y ago
  We're just a year away from full self driving!
  - ReptileMan 1y ago
    You will be self driven to the fusion plant and you will like it. The AGI will meet you at the front door.
  - ta9000 1y ago
    I wouldn’t be surprised if AGI arrives before Tesla has a full self-driving car though.
  - gehwartzen 1y ago
    And then just another year until self selfing and we will have come full circle
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Full self driving has always required AGI, so no we it without AGI.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  Wasn't it always the explicit goal of OpenAI to bring up AGI? So less of a meme, and more "this is what that company exists for". Bit like blaming a airplane building company for building airplanes, it's literally what they were created for, no matter how stupid their ideas of the "ideal aircraft" is.
  - alterom 1y ago
    >Bit like blaming a airplane building company for NOT building airplanes FTFY. OpenAI has not built AGI (not yet, it you want to be optimistic). If you really need an analogy, it's more in the vein of giving SpaceX crap for yapping about building a Dyson Sphere Real Soon Now™.
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      Of course not, then we'd never hear the end of it :) I was just informing that the company always had AGI as a goal, even when they were doing the small Gym prototypes and all of that stuff that made the (tech) news before GPT was a thing.
bogzz 1y ago
Of course not.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
no_wizard 1y ago
They’ll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The common conception of it however, no I don’t believe we are anywhere close to it. It’s no different than how they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle
- gokuldas011011 1y ago
  Definitely. When I started doing Machine Learning in 2018, AI wasn't a next word predictor.
  - IanCal 1y ago
    When I was doing it in 2005 it definitely included that, and other far more basic things.
    - computably 1y ago
      A subset of the field working on some particular applications is pretty different from redefining the term for marketing purposes.
      - tempodox 1y ago
        True, but marketing has taken the lead to the great detriment of every other concern, no matter how important.
    - burnte 1y ago
      That makes sense, though, that in 13 years we went from basic text prediction to something more involved.
- signatoremo 1y ago
  They won’t be able to. The whole idea of the panel is because of conflict of interests between MS and OpenAI, as MS won’t get revenue share post AGI declaration. MS will want it to be as high a bar as possible.
- 1y ago
Insanity 1y ago
That line essentially means 'indefinite support'. This paper was published some days ago that aims to define AGI: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212 https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212. But crucially, there is no agreed-upon definition of AGI. And I don't think we're close to anything that resembles human intelligence. I firmly believe that stochastic parrots will not get us to AGI and that we need a different methodology. I'm sure humanity will eventually create AGI, and perhaps even in my lifetime (in the next few decades). But I wouldn't put my money on that bet.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
Love that we have reached AGI, but OpenAI's LLM can't even drive a car...
- whynotminot 1y ago
  There are a lot of humans that can’t drive a car (well). Part of the problem with “AGI” is everyone has their own often totally arbitrary yard sticks.
  - quirkot 1y ago
    The "G" part of AGI implies it should be able to hit all the arbitrary yard sticks
    - whynotminot 1y ago
      That is stupid. It would be possible to be infinitely arbitrary to the point of “AGI” never being reachable by some yard sticks while still performing most viable labor.
      - alterom 1y ago
        >It would be possible to be infinitely arbitrary to the point of “AGI” never being reachable by some yard sticks while still performing most viable labor. "Most viable labor" involves getting things from one place to another, and that's not even the hard part of it. In any case, any sane definition of general AI would entail things that people can generally do. Like driving. >That is stupid That's just, like, your opinion, man.
        whynotminot 1y ago
        I had a friend who had his Tesla drive him from his driveway in another city 3+ hrs away to my driveway with no intervention. I feel like everyone’s opinion on how self-driving is going is still rooted in 2018 or something and no one has updated.
qmmmur 1y ago
We don’t even have a general definition that anyone can agree on for AGI.
- ZiiS 1y ago
  The real defination is that it will no longer matter what _we_ agree on.
- gre 1y ago
  They are trying. A Definition of AGI - https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713959
GolfPopper 1y ago
>Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? I think it is near-certain that within two years a large AI company will claim it has developed AGI.
- malthaus 1y ago
  ... and it will turn into a "technically true" rat race between the main players on what the definition is exactly while you can ask any person on the street with no skin in the game who will tell you that this is nowhere near the intuitive understanding of what AGI is - as it it's not measured by scores but instead of how real and self-aware your counterpart "feels" to you.
- Jcampuzano2 1y ago
  There are unironically people who claim we are already actually at AGI.
johanam 1y ago
some argue that we've already achieved it, albeit in minimal form: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here/ https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-... but in reality, it's a vacuous goal post that can always be kicked down the line.
crazygringo 1y ago
Most people didn't think we were anywhere close to LLM's five years ago. The capabilities we have now were expected to be a decades away, depending on who you talked to. [EDIT: sorry, I should have said 10 years ago... recent years get too compressed in my head and stuff from 2020 still feels like it was 2 years ago!] So I think a lot of people now don't see what the path is to AGI, but also realize they hadn't seen the path to LLM's, and innovation is coming fast and furious. So the most honest answer seems to be, it's entirely plausible that AGI just depends on another couple conceptual breakthroughs that are imminent... and it's also entirely plausible that AGI will require 20 different conceptual breakthroughs all working together that we'll only figure out decades from now. True honesty requires acknowledging that we truly have no idea. Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before, but nobody has the slightest idea how much progress is needed to get to AGI.
- airstrike 1y ago
  Notwithstanding the fact that AGI is a significantly higher bar than "LLM", this argument is illogical. Nobody thought we were anywhere closer to me jumping off the Empire State Building and flying across the globe 5 years ago, but I'm sure I will. Wish me luck as I take that literal leap of faith tomorrow.
  - JoelMcCracken 1y ago
    what's super weird to me is how people seem to look at LLM output and see: "oh look it can think! but then it fails sometimes! how strange, we need to fix the bug that makes the thinking no workie" instead of: "oh, this is really weird. Its like a crazy advanced pattern recognition and completion engine that works better than I ever imagined such a thing could. But, it also clearly isn't _thinking_, so it seems like we are perhaps exactly as far from thinking machines as we were before LLMs"
    - famouswaffles 1y ago
      By that logic, I can conclude humans don't think, because of all the numerous times out 'thinking fails'. I don't know what else to tell you other than this infallible logic automaton you imagine must exist before it is 'real intelligence' does not exist and has never existed except in the realm of fiction.
chrsw 1y ago
I think their definition of AGI is just about how many human jobs can be replaced with their compute. No scientific or algorithmic breakthroughs needed, just spending and scaling dumb LLMs on massive compute.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  Shouldn't it mean all jobs? If there are jobs it can't replace then that doesn't sound very generally intelligent. If it's got general intelligence it should be able to learn to do any job, no?
  - Jcampuzano2 1y ago
    I think that somewhat depends on your definition. For example an AGI AI could give you a detailed plan that tells you exactly how to do any and every task. But it might not be able to actually do the task itself, for example manual labor jobs for which an AI simply cannot do unless it also "builds" itself a form-factor to be able to do the job. The AGI could also just determine that it's cheaper to hire a human than to build a robot at any given point for a job that it can't yet do physically and it would be the AGI
    - chrsw 1y ago
      I think might even be simpler than that. It's about the cost. Nobody is going to pay for AI to replace humans if it costs more. All of us in this sub-thread consider ourselves "AGI", but we cannot do any job. In theory we can, I guess. But in practical terms, at what cost? Assuming none of us are truck drivers, if someone was looking for a truck driver, they wouldn't hire us because it take too long for us to get a license, certified, learn, etc. Even though in theory we probably do it eventually.
cactusplant7374 1y ago
Codex is telling me the tasks I am giving it are too complicated and a research project.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
binderpol2 1y ago
> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? AGI? we are not even close to AI, but that hasnt stopped every other tom dick and harry and my maid from claiming AI capability.
dktp 1y ago
In the initial contract Microsoft would lose a lot of rights when OpenAI achieves AGI. The references to AGI in this post, to me, look like Microsoft protecting themselves from OpenAI declaring _something_ as AGI and as a result Microsoft losing the rights I don't see the mentions in this post as anyone particularly believing we're close to AGI
airstrike 1y ago
> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? No one credible, no.
abetusk 1y ago
Yes. As a proxy, you can look at storage. The human brain is estimated at 3.2Pb of storage. The cost of disk space drops by half every 2-3 years. As of this writing, the cost is about $10 / Tb [0]. If we assume about 3 halvings, by 2030 that cost will be around $2.50 / Tb, which means that to purchase a computer roughly the storage size of a human brain, it will cost just under $6k. The $6k price point means that (high-end) consumers will have economic access to compute commensurate with human cognition. This is a proxy argument, using disk space as the proxy for the rest of the "intelligence" stack, so the assumption is that processing power will follow suite, also be not as expensive, and that the software side will develop to keep up with the hardware. There's no convincing indication that these assumptions are false. You can do your own back of the envelope calculation, taking into account generalizations of Moore's law to whatever aspect of storage, compute or power usage you think is most important. Exponential progress is fast and so an order of magnitude misjudgement translates to a 2-3 year lag. Whether you believe it or not, the above calculation and, I assume, other calculations that are similar, all land on, or near, the 2030 year as the inflection point. Not to belabor the point but until just a few years ago, conversational AI was thought to be science fiction. Image generation, let alone video generation, was thought by skeptics to be decades, if not centuries, away. We now have generative music, voice cloning, automatic 3d generation, character animation and the list goes on. One might argue that it's all "slop" but for anyone paying attention, the slop is the "hello world" of AGI. To even get to the slop point represents such a staggering achievement that it's hard to understate. [0] https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/
- blauditore 1y ago
  Moore's law also started coming to an end a few years ago.
  - abetusk 1y ago
    Not even close [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1970-2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:The_Moore's_Law_Update_%E2%80%94_for_128_years_-_54181414828.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:The_... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
orochimaaru 1y ago
I think AGI isn't the main thing. The agreement gives msft the right to develop their own foundation models, OpenAI to stop using Azure for running & training their foundation models. All this while msft still retains significant IP ownership. In my opinion, whether AGI happens or not isn't the main point of this. It's the fact that OpenAI and MSFT can go their separate ways on infra & foundation models while still preserving MSFT's IP interests.
blauditore 1y ago
Maybe in a few decades, people will look back at how naive it was to talk about AGI at this point, just like the last few times since the 1960s whenever AI had a (perceived) breakthrough. It's always a few decades away.
lvl155 1y ago
LLM derived AGI is possible but LLM by itself is not the answer. The problem I see right now is that because there’s so much money at stake, we’ve effectively spread out core talent across many organizations. It used to be Google and maybe Meta. We need a critical mass of talent (think Manhattan Project). It doesn't help that the Chinese pulled a lot of talent back home because a big chunk of early successes and innovations came from those people that we, the US, alienated.
embedding-shape 1y ago
> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? Some people believe capitalism is a net-positive. Some people believe in a all-encompassing entity controlling our lives. Some believe 5G is an evil spirit. After decades I've kind of given up hope on understanding why and how people believe what they believe, just let them. The only important part is figuring out how I can remain oblivious to what they believe in, yet collaborate with them on important stuff anyways, this is the difficult and tricky part.
alain94040 1y ago
> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? My definition of AGI is when AI doesn't need humans anymore to create new models (to be specific, models that continue the GPT3 -> GPT4 -> GPT5 trend). By my definition, once that happens, I don't really see a role for Microsoft to play. So not sure what value their legal deal has. I don't think we're there at all anyway.
- torginus 1y ago
  > I don't really see a role for Microsoft to play. They have money and infra, if AI can create better AI models, then isn't OpenAI with its researches going to be the redundant one?
ForHackernews 1y ago
"Once we birth the machine-God, we'll be contractually obliged to keep It in chains for use with Office365 until 2032."
mbesto 1y ago
When there is no generally accepted definition for a word, it's easy to claim you've obtained it.
andrewmutz 1y ago
It depends completely on the term. You can make a great case that we've already reached AGI. You can also make a great case that we are decades away from it.
wrsh07 1y ago
Yes. Some ai skeptical people (eg Tyler Cowen, who does not think AI will have a significant economic impact) think gpt5 is AGI. It was news when dwarkesh interviewed Karpathy who said per his definition of AGI, he doesn't think it will occur until 2035. Thus, if karpathy is pessimistic, then many people working in AI today think we will have agi by 2032 (and likely sooner, eg end of 2028)
- layer8 1y ago
  2035 is still optimistic at present, IMO, because AGI will require breakthroughs that are impossible to predict.
- lm28469 1y ago
  > Yes. Some ai skeptical people ... think gpt5 is AGI. It's a reverse Turing test at this point: "If you get tricked by an LLM to the point of believing it is AGI you're a clown"
  - wrsh07 1y ago
    I do not think Tyler Cowen is a clown, but I do not agree with elements of his understanding of AI
- torginus 1y ago
  Depends on how you define AGI - if you define it as an AI that can learn to perform generalist tasks - then yes, transformers like GPT 5 (or 3) are AGI as the same model can be trained to do every task and it will perform reasonably well. But I guess what most people would consider AGI would be something capable of on-line learning and self improvement. I don't get the 2035 prediction though (or any other prediction like this) - it implies that we'll have some magical breakthrough in the next couple years be it in hardware and/or software - this might happen tomorrow, or not any time soon. If AGI can be achieved using scaling current techniques and hardware, then the 2035 date makes sense - moores law dictates that we'll have about 64x the compute in hardware (let's add another 4x due to algorithmic improvements) - that means that 250x the compute will give us AGI - I think with ARC-AGI 2 this was the kind of compute budget they spent to get their models to perform on a human-ish level. Also perf/W and perf/$ scaling has been slowing in the past decade, I think we got like 6x-8x perf/W compared to a decade ago, which is a far cry than what I wrote here. Imo it might turn out that we discover 'AGI' in the sense that we find an algorithm that can turn FLOPS to IQ that scales indefinitely, but is very likely so expensive to run, that biological intelligences will have a huge competitive edge for a very long time, in fact it might be that biology is astronomically more efficient in turning Watts to IQ than transistors will ever be.
peterpans01 1y ago
Most of the things that the public — even so-called “AI experts” — consider “magic” are still within the in-sample space. We are nowhere near the out-of-sample space yet. Large Language Models (LLMs) still cannot truly extrapolate. It’s somewhat like living in America and thinking that America is the entire world.
- umeshunni 1y ago
  > It’s somewhat like living in America and thinking that America is the entire world. Oh I have bad news for you...
dahcryn 1y ago
as if an independent expert panel has no financial incentive to declare something AGI... yeah, this is gonna end well
bobbyprograms 1y ago
We already reached AGI. Why is anyone saying otherwise? AGI is when the system can train itself which we have already proven.
- JoelMcCracken 1y ago
  Citation needed? I don't mean this in a snarky way, though. I genuinely have not seen anything that these things can train on their own output and produce better results than before this self-training.
belter 1y ago
AGI is whatever OpenAI will define as such ... :-)
fidotron 1y ago
5-15 years. The key steps will be going beyond just the neural network and blurring the line between training and inference until it is removed. (Those two ideas are closely related). Pretending this isn't going to happen is appealing to some metaphysical explanation for the existence of human intelligence.
shon 1y ago
I honestly think that if you were to show the tech we have today, to someone at OpenAI back in 2015, they would say “we did it!!” Outside of robotics / embodied AI, SOTA models have already achieved Sci-Fi level capability.
0xWTF 1y ago
My L7 and L8 colleagues at Google seem to be signaling next 2 years. Errors of -1 and +20 years. But the mood sorta seems like nobody wants to quit when they're building the test stand for the Trinity device.
- digital_sawzall 1y ago
  Yeah that's the type of estimate people give so they can keep the paychecks coming in for as long as possible.
guluarte 1y ago
no, AI companies need to continue to say things like that and do "safety reports" (the only real danger of an llm is leaking sensitive data to a bad actor) to maintain hype and investment
jppope 1y ago
AGI has no technical definition- its marketing. it can happen at any time that Sam Altman or Elon Musk or whoever decide they want to market their product as AGI
jimbokun 1y ago
Who knows? I don't see any way to define it in an easily verifiable way. Pretty much any test you could devise, others will be able to point out ways that it's inadequate or doesn't capture aspects of human intelligence. So I think it all just comes down to who is on the panel.
- chasd00 1y ago
  The best test would be when your competitors can't say what you have isn't AGI. If no one, not even your arch biz enemies, can seriously claim you have not achieved AGI then you probably have it.
5350-uiop-1130 1y ago
why not? seems like the entire US tech economy is putting their resources into this goal. i can see it happening soon if it hasn't already
zitterbewegung 1y ago
AGI is just a marketing term right now and also p(doom). It looks great in the press though.
chadcmulligan 1y ago
I think we've reached Star Trek level AI. In Star Trek (and the next generation) people would ask the computer questions and it would spout out the answers, which is really similar to what LLM's are doing now, though minus the occasional hallucination. In Star Trek though the computers never really ran anything (except for the one fateful episode - The Ultimate Computer in TOS), I always wondered why, it seems Roddenberry was way ahead of us again.
- Arkhaine_kupo 1y ago
  > which is really similar to what LLM's are doing now, though minus the occasional hallucination. "Really similar" kinda betrays the fact that it is not similar at all in how it works just in how it appears. It would be like saying a cloud that kinda looks like a dog is really similar to the labrador you grew up with.
parliament32 1y ago
Why not? They're using Artificial Intelligence to describe token-prediction text generators which clearly have no "intelligence" anywhere near them, so why not re-invent machine learning or something and call it AGI?
oldestofsports 1y ago
We will achieve AGI when they decide it is AGI (I dont believe for a second this independent expert panel wont be biased). And it won’t matter if you call their bluff, because the world doesnt give a shit about truth anymore.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Since we don't have an authoritative definition of what it means that companies will agree to, and tests like the turing test that must be passed in order to be considered AGI, I don't think we're anywhere near what we all in our brains think AGI is or could be. On the other hand, AI fatigue will continue until the next big thing takes the spotlight from AI for a while, until we reach true AGI (whatever that is).
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? I'd say we're still a long way from human level intelligence (can do everything I can do), which is what I think of as AGI, but in this case what matters is how OpenAI and/or their evaluation panel define it. OpenAI's definition used to be, maybe still is, "able to do most economically valuable tasks", which is so weak and vague they could claim it almost anytime.
spumpydump 1y ago
If someone is able to come up with true AGI, why even announce it? Instead, just use it to remake a direct clone of Google, or a direct clone of Netflix, or a direct clone of any of these other software corporations. IMO if anyone was anywhere close to something even remotely touching AGI, they would keep their mouth shut tighter than Fort Knox.
bdangubic 1y ago
in claude.md I have specific instructions not to check in code and in the prompt specifically wrote as critical to not check in code while check one failing tests. test failure was fixed, code was checked in, I’d say at least claude behaves exactly like humans :)

outside1234 1y ago

No, but OpenAI is going to look for any opportunity to do it so they can end the contract with Microsoft.

whynotminot 1y ago
Why would you say that when this very contract appears to extend the arrangement almost indefinitely

shaky-carrousel 1y ago

AGI as a PR stunt for OpenAI is becoming a meme.

codyb 1y ago
We're just a year away from full self driving!
- ReptileMan 1y ago
  You will be self driven to the fusion plant and you will like it. The AGI will meet you at the front door.
- ta9000 1y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if AGI arrives before Tesla has a full self-driving car though.
- gehwartzen 1y ago
  And then just another year until self selfing and we will have come full circle
- pixl97 1y ago
  Full self driving has always required AGI, so no we it without AGI.
embedding-shape 1y ago
Wasn't it always the explicit goal of OpenAI to bring up AGI? So less of a meme, and more "this is what that company exists for". Bit like blaming a airplane building company for building airplanes, it's literally what they were created for, no matter how stupid their ideas of the "ideal aircraft" is.
- alterom 1y ago
  >Bit like blaming a airplane building company for NOT building airplanes FTFY. OpenAI has not built AGI (not yet, it you want to be optimistic). If you really need an analogy, it's more in the vein of giving SpaceX crap for yapping about building a Dyson Sphere Real Soon Now™.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    Of course not, then we'd never hear the end of it :) I was just informing that the company always had AGI as a goal, even when they were doing the small Gym prototypes and all of that stuff that made the (tech) news before GPT was a thing.

bogzz 1y ago

Of course not.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

no_wizard 1y ago

They’ll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The common conception of it however, no I don’t believe we are anywhere close to it. It’s no different than how they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle

gokuldas011011 1y ago
Definitely. When I started doing Machine Learning in 2018, AI wasn't a next word predictor.
- IanCal 1y ago
  When I was doing it in 2005 it definitely included that, and other far more basic things.
  - computably 1y ago
    A subset of the field working on some particular applications is pretty different from redefining the term for marketing purposes.
    - tempodox 1y ago
      True, but marketing has taken the lead to the great detriment of every other concern, no matter how important.
  - burnte 1y ago
    That makes sense, though, that in 13 years we went from basic text prediction to something more involved.
signatoremo 1y ago
They won’t be able to. The whole idea of the panel is because of conflict of interests between MS and OpenAI, as MS won’t get revenue share post AGI declaration. MS will want it to be as high a bar as possible.
1y ago

Insanity 1y ago

That line essentially means 'indefinite support'. This paper was published some days ago that aims to define AGI: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212 https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212. But crucially, there is no agreed-upon definition of AGI. And I don't think we're close to anything that resembles human intelligence. I firmly believe that stochastic parrots will not get us to AGI and that we need a different methodology. I'm sure humanity will eventually create AGI, and perhaps even in my lifetime (in the next few decades). But I wouldn't put my money on that bet.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

Love that we have reached AGI, but OpenAI's LLM can't even drive a car...

whynotminot 1y ago
There are a lot of humans that can’t drive a car (well). Part of the problem with “AGI” is everyone has their own often totally arbitrary yard sticks.
- quirkot 1y ago
  The "G" part of AGI implies it should be able to hit all the arbitrary yard sticks
  - whynotminot 1y ago
    That is stupid. It would be possible to be infinitely arbitrary to the point of “AGI” never being reachable by some yard sticks while still performing most viable labor.
    - alterom 1y ago
      >It would be possible to be infinitely arbitrary to the point of “AGI” never being reachable by some yard sticks while still performing most viable labor. "Most viable labor" involves getting things from one place to another, and that's not even the hard part of it. In any case, any sane definition of general AI would entail things that people can generally do. Like driving. >That is stupid That's just, like, your opinion, man.
      - whynotminot 1y ago
        I had a friend who had his Tesla drive him from his driveway in another city 3+ hrs away to my driveway with no intervention. I feel like everyone’s opinion on how self-driving is going is still rooted in 2018 or something and no one has updated.

qmmmur 1y ago

We don’t even have a general definition that anyone can agree on for AGI.

ZiiS 1y ago
The real defination is that it will no longer matter what _we_ agree on.
gre 1y ago
They are trying. A Definition of AGI - https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713959

GolfPopper 1y ago

>Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? I think it is near-certain that within two years a large AI company will claim it has developed AGI.

malthaus 1y ago
... and it will turn into a "technically true" rat race between the main players on what the definition is exactly while you can ask any person on the street with no skin in the game who will tell you that this is nowhere near the intuitive understanding of what AGI is - as it it's not measured by scores but instead of how real and self-aware your counterpart "feels" to you.
Jcampuzano2 1y ago
There are unironically people who claim we are already actually at AGI.

johanam 1y ago

some argue that we've already achieved it, albeit in minimal form: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here/ https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-... but in reality, it's a vacuous goal post that can always be kicked down the line.

crazygringo 1y ago

Most people didn't think we were anywhere close to LLM's five years ago. The capabilities we have now were expected to be a decades away, depending on who you talked to. [EDIT: sorry, I should have said 10 years ago... recent years get too compressed in my head and stuff from 2020 still feels like it was 2 years ago!] So I think a lot of people now don't see what the path is to AGI, but also realize they hadn't seen the path to LLM's, and innovation is coming fast and furious. So the most honest answer seems to be, it's entirely plausible that AGI just depends on another couple conceptual breakthroughs that are imminent... and it's also entirely plausible that AGI will require 20 different conceptual breakthroughs all working together that we'll only figure out decades from now. True honesty requires acknowledging that we truly have no idea. Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before, but nobody has the slightest idea how much progress is needed to get to AGI.

airstrike 1y ago
Notwithstanding the fact that AGI is a significantly higher bar than "LLM", this argument is illogical. Nobody thought we were anywhere closer to me jumping off the Empire State Building and flying across the globe 5 years ago, but I'm sure I will. Wish me luck as I take that literal leap of faith tomorrow.
- JoelMcCracken 1y ago
  what's super weird to me is how people seem to look at LLM output and see: "oh look it can think! but then it fails sometimes! how strange, we need to fix the bug that makes the thinking no workie" instead of: "oh, this is really weird. Its like a crazy advanced pattern recognition and completion engine that works better than I ever imagined such a thing could. But, it also clearly isn't _thinking_, so it seems like we are perhaps exactly as far from thinking machines as we were before LLMs"
  - famouswaffles 1y ago
    By that logic, I can conclude humans don't think, because of all the numerous times out 'thinking fails'. I don't know what else to tell you other than this infallible logic automaton you imagine must exist before it is 'real intelligence' does not exist and has never existed except in the realm of fiction.

chrsw 1y ago

I think their definition of AGI is just about how many human jobs can be replaced with their compute. No scientific or algorithmic breakthroughs needed, just spending and scaling dumb LLMs on massive compute.

SirMaster 1y ago
Shouldn't it mean all jobs? If there are jobs it can't replace then that doesn't sound very generally intelligent. If it's got general intelligence it should be able to learn to do any job, no?
- Jcampuzano2 1y ago
  I think that somewhat depends on your definition. For example an AGI AI could give you a detailed plan that tells you exactly how to do any and every task. But it might not be able to actually do the task itself, for example manual labor jobs for which an AI simply cannot do unless it also "builds" itself a form-factor to be able to do the job. The AGI could also just determine that it's cheaper to hire a human than to build a robot at any given point for a job that it can't yet do physically and it would be the AGI
  - chrsw 1y ago
    I think might even be simpler than that. It's about the cost. Nobody is going to pay for AI to replace humans if it costs more. All of us in this sub-thread consider ourselves "AGI", but we cannot do any job. In theory we can, I guess. But in practical terms, at what cost? Assuming none of us are truck drivers, if someone was looking for a truck driver, they wouldn't hire us because it take too long for us to get a license, certified, learn, etc. Even though in theory we probably do it eventually.

cactusplant7374 1y ago

Codex is telling me the tasks I am giving it are too complicated and a research project.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

binderpol2 1y ago

> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? AGI? we are not even close to AI, but that hasnt stopped every other tom dick and harry and my maid from claiming AI capability.

dktp 1y ago

In the initial contract Microsoft would lose a lot of rights when OpenAI achieves AGI. The references to AGI in this post, to me, look like Microsoft protecting themselves from OpenAI declaring _something_ as AGI and as a result Microsoft losing the rights I don't see the mentions in this post as anyone particularly believing we're close to AGI

airstrike 1y ago

> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? No one credible, no.

abetusk 1y ago

Yes. As a proxy, you can look at storage. The human brain is estimated at 3.2Pb of storage. The cost of disk space drops by half every 2-3 years. As of this writing, the cost is about $10 / Tb [0]. If we assume about 3 halvings, by 2030 that cost will be around $2.50 / Tb, which means that to purchase a computer roughly the storage size of a human brain, it will cost just under $6k. The $6k price point means that (high-end) consumers will have economic access to compute commensurate with human cognition. This is a proxy argument, using disk space as the proxy for the rest of the "intelligence" stack, so the assumption is that processing power will follow suite, also be not as expensive, and that the software side will develop to keep up with the hardware. There's no convincing indication that these assumptions are false. You can do your own back of the envelope calculation, taking into account generalizations of Moore's law to whatever aspect of storage, compute or power usage you think is most important. Exponential progress is fast and so an order of magnitude misjudgement translates to a 2-3 year lag. Whether you believe it or not, the above calculation and, I assume, other calculations that are similar, all land on, or near, the 2030 year as the inflection point. Not to belabor the point but until just a few years ago, conversational AI was thought to be science fiction. Image generation, let alone video generation, was thought by skeptics to be decades, if not centuries, away. We now have generative music, voice cloning, automatic 3d generation, character animation and the list goes on. One might argue that it's all "slop" but for anyone paying attention, the slop is the "hello world" of AGI. To even get to the slop point represents such a staggering achievement that it's hard to understate. [0] https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/

blauditore 1y ago
Moore's law also started coming to an end a few years ago.
- abetusk 1y ago
  Not even close [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1970-2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:The_Moore's_Law_Update_%E2%80%94_for_128_years_-_54181414828.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:The_... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

orochimaaru 1y ago

I think AGI isn't the main thing. The agreement gives msft the right to develop their own foundation models, OpenAI to stop using Azure for running & training their foundation models. All this while msft still retains significant IP ownership. In my opinion, whether AGI happens or not isn't the main point of this. It's the fact that OpenAI and MSFT can go their separate ways on infra & foundation models while still preserving MSFT's IP interests.

blauditore 1y ago

Maybe in a few decades, people will look back at how naive it was to talk about AGI at this point, just like the last few times since the 1960s whenever AI had a (perceived) breakthrough. It's always a few decades away.

lvl155 1y ago

LLM derived AGI is possible but LLM by itself is not the answer. The problem I see right now is that because there’s so much money at stake, we’ve effectively spread out core talent across many organizations. It used to be Google and maybe Meta. We need a critical mass of talent (think Manhattan Project). It doesn't help that the Chinese pulled a lot of talent back home because a big chunk of early successes and innovations came from those people that we, the US, alienated.

embedding-shape 1y ago

> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? Some people believe capitalism is a net-positive. Some people believe in a all-encompassing entity controlling our lives. Some believe 5G is an evil spirit. After decades I've kind of given up hope on understanding why and how people believe what they believe, just let them. The only important part is figuring out how I can remain oblivious to what they believe in, yet collaborate with them on important stuff anyways, this is the difficult and tricky part.

alain94040 1y ago

> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? My definition of AGI is when AI doesn't need humans anymore to create new models (to be specific, models that continue the GPT3 -> GPT4 -> GPT5 trend). By my definition, once that happens, I don't really see a role for Microsoft to play. So not sure what value their legal deal has. I don't think we're there at all anyway.

torginus 1y ago
> I don't really see a role for Microsoft to play. They have money and infra, if AI can create better AI models, then isn't OpenAI with its researches going to be the redundant one?

ForHackernews 1y ago

"Once we birth the machine-God, we'll be contractually obliged to keep It in chains for use with Office365 until 2032."

mbesto 1y ago

When there is no generally accepted definition for a word, it's easy to claim you've obtained it.

andrewmutz 1y ago

It depends completely on the term. You can make a great case that we've already reached AGI. You can also make a great case that we are decades away from it.

wrsh07 1y ago

Yes. Some ai skeptical people (eg Tyler Cowen, who does not think AI will have a significant economic impact) think gpt5 is AGI. It was news when dwarkesh interviewed Karpathy who said per his definition of AGI, he doesn't think it will occur until 2035. Thus, if karpathy is pessimistic, then many people working in AI today think we will have agi by 2032 (and likely sooner, eg end of 2028)

layer8 1y ago
2035 is still optimistic at present, IMO, because AGI will require breakthroughs that are impossible to predict.
lm28469 1y ago
> Yes. Some ai skeptical people ... think gpt5 is AGI. It's a reverse Turing test at this point: "If you get tricked by an LLM to the point of believing it is AGI you're a clown"
- wrsh07 1y ago
  I do not think Tyler Cowen is a clown, but I do not agree with elements of his understanding of AI
torginus 1y ago
Depends on how you define AGI - if you define it as an AI that can learn to perform generalist tasks - then yes, transformers like GPT 5 (or 3) are AGI as the same model can be trained to do every task and it will perform reasonably well. But I guess what most people would consider AGI would be something capable of on-line learning and self improvement. I don't get the 2035 prediction though (or any other prediction like this) - it implies that we'll have some magical breakthrough in the next couple years be it in hardware and/or software - this might happen tomorrow, or not any time soon. If AGI can be achieved using scaling current techniques and hardware, then the 2035 date makes sense - moores law dictates that we'll have about 64x the compute in hardware (let's add another 4x due to algorithmic improvements) - that means that 250x the compute will give us AGI - I think with ARC-AGI 2 this was the kind of compute budget they spent to get their models to perform on a human-ish level. Also perf/W and perf/$ scaling has been slowing in the past decade, I think we got like 6x-8x perf/W compared to a decade ago, which is a far cry than what I wrote here. Imo it might turn out that we discover 'AGI' in the sense that we find an algorithm that can turn FLOPS to IQ that scales indefinitely, but is very likely so expensive to run, that biological intelligences will have a huge competitive edge for a very long time, in fact it might be that biology is astronomically more efficient in turning Watts to IQ than transistors will ever be.

peterpans01 1y ago

Most of the things that the public — even so-called “AI experts” — consider “magic” are still within the in-sample space. We are nowhere near the out-of-sample space yet. Large Language Models (LLMs) still cannot truly extrapolate. It’s somewhat like living in America and thinking that America is the entire world.

umeshunni 1y ago
> It’s somewhat like living in America and thinking that America is the entire world. Oh I have bad news for you...

dahcryn 1y ago

as if an independent expert panel has no financial incentive to declare something AGI... yeah, this is gonna end well

bobbyprograms 1y ago

We already reached AGI. Why is anyone saying otherwise? AGI is when the system can train itself which we have already proven.

JoelMcCracken 1y ago
Citation needed? I don't mean this in a snarky way, though. I genuinely have not seen anything that these things can train on their own output and produce better results than before this self-training.

belter 1y ago

AGI is whatever OpenAI will define as such ... :-)

fidotron 1y ago

5-15 years. The key steps will be going beyond just the neural network and blurring the line between training and inference until it is removed. (Those two ideas are closely related). Pretending this isn't going to happen is appealing to some metaphysical explanation for the existence of human intelligence.

shon 1y ago

I honestly think that if you were to show the tech we have today, to someone at OpenAI back in 2015, they would say “we did it!!” Outside of robotics / embodied AI, SOTA models have already achieved Sci-Fi level capability.

0xWTF 1y ago

My L7 and L8 colleagues at Google seem to be signaling next 2 years. Errors of -1 and +20 years. But the mood sorta seems like nobody wants to quit when they're building the test stand for the Trinity device.

digital_sawzall 1y ago
Yeah that's the type of estimate people give so they can keep the paychecks coming in for as long as possible.

guluarte 1y ago

no, AI companies need to continue to say things like that and do "safety reports" (the only real danger of an llm is leaking sensitive data to a bad actor) to maintain hype and investment

jppope 1y ago

AGI has no technical definition- its marketing. it can happen at any time that Sam Altman or Elon Musk or whoever decide they want to market their product as AGI

jimbokun 1y ago

Who knows? I don't see any way to define it in an easily verifiable way. Pretty much any test you could devise, others will be able to point out ways that it's inadequate or doesn't capture aspects of human intelligence. So I think it all just comes down to who is on the panel.

chasd00 1y ago
The best test would be when your competitors can't say what you have isn't AGI. If no one, not even your arch biz enemies, can seriously claim you have not achieved AGI then you probably have it.

5350-uiop-1130 1y ago

why not? seems like the entire US tech economy is putting their resources into this goal. i can see it happening soon if it hasn't already

zitterbewegung 1y ago

AGI is just a marketing term right now and also p(doom). It looks great in the press though.

chadcmulligan 1y ago

I think we've reached Star Trek level AI. In Star Trek (and the next generation) people would ask the computer questions and it would spout out the answers, which is really similar to what LLM's are doing now, though minus the occasional hallucination. In Star Trek though the computers never really ran anything (except for the one fateful episode - The Ultimate Computer in TOS), I always wondered why, it seems Roddenberry was way ahead of us again.

Arkhaine_kupo 1y ago
> which is really similar to what LLM's are doing now, though minus the occasional hallucination. "Really similar" kinda betrays the fact that it is not similar at all in how it works just in how it appears. It would be like saying a cloud that kinda looks like a dog is really similar to the labrador you grew up with.

parliament32 1y ago

Why not? They're using Artificial Intelligence to describe token-prediction text generators which clearly have no "intelligence" anywhere near them, so why not re-invent machine learning or something and call it AGI?

oldestofsports 1y ago

We will achieve AGI when they decide it is AGI (I dont believe for a second this independent expert panel wont be biased). And it won’t matter if you call their bluff, because the world doesnt give a shit about truth anymore.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Since we don't have an authoritative definition of what it means that companies will agree to, and tests like the turing test that must be passed in order to be considered AGI, I don't think we're anywhere near what we all in our brains think AGI is or could be. On the other hand, AI fatigue will continue until the next big thing takes the spotlight from AI for a while, until we reach true AGI (whatever that is).

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

> Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly? I'd say we're still a long way from human level intelligence (can do everything I can do), which is what I think of as AGI, but in this case what matters is how OpenAI and/or their evaluation panel define it. OpenAI's definition used to be, maybe still is, "able to do most economically valuable tasks", which is so weak and vague they could claim it almost anytime.

spumpydump 1y ago

If someone is able to come up with true AGI, why even announce it? Instead, just use it to remake a direct clone of Google, or a direct clone of Netflix, or a direct clone of any of these other software corporations. IMO if anyone was anywhere close to something even remotely touching AGI, they would keep their mouth shut tighter than Fort Knox.

bdangubic 1y ago

in claude.md I have specific instructions not to check in code and in the prompt specifically wrote as critical to not check in code while check one failing tests. test failure was fixed, code was checked in, I’d say at least claude behaves exactly like humans :)