[TacticalCoder]

I've got a much simpler definition: an AGI should be able to produce a better version of itself.

I'm not saying this would necessarily lead to the technological singularity: maybe it's somehow a dead end. Maybe the "better version of itself, which itself shall built a better version of itself" will be stuck at some point, hitting some limit that'd still make it less intelligent than the most intelligent humans. That I don't know.

But what I know is that an AI that is incapable of producing a better version of itself is less intelligent than the humans who created it in the first place.

[cryptoz]

I actually really like this definition and will be giving it some thought. But right off the bat, that’s not how most people will see it - and so while this definition is certainly thought-provoking and useful, it doesn’t specify much that’s relatable to other tasks and therefore I think will always be a niche definition.

An AI that can make a better version of itself may not be able to communicate in any human language for example; and that is now a de facto requirement for most people to see something as AI I think.

[ben_w]

> I'm not saying this would necessarily lead to the technological singularity:

You kinda are though: if it hits a limit and can no longer make a better version of itself, then your definition means the final one in the sequence isn't an AGI even though it's worse parent is.

> But what I know is that an AI that is incapable of producing a better version of itself is less intelligent than the humans who created it in the first place.

Neither necessary nor sufficient:

(1) they are made by teams of expert humans, so an AGI could be smarter than any one of them and still not as capable as the group (kinda like how humans are smarter than evolution, but not smart enough to make a superhuman intelligence even though evolution made us by having lots of entities and time)

(2) one that can do this can still merely be a special-purpose AI that's no good at anything else (like an optimising compiler told to compile its own source code)

(3) what if it can only make its own equal, being already at some upper limit?

[FabHK]

> an AGI should be able to produce a better version of itself.

So humans do not have GI?

[orbital-decay]

They do. 99% of what you think as human intelligence is social, and has been obtained by previous generations and passed to the person. In a sense, we are hugely overfitted on distilled knowledge, actual biological capabilities are much less impressive.

[arcastroe]

As a somewhat narrow counter-example, genetic algorithms are able to produce better versions of themselves but do not qualify as AGI.

[persnickety]

Are there any examples of genetic algorithms producing genetic algorithms outside of nature?

The classic synthetic way is a genetic algorithm producing increasingly better outputs.