[mrandish]

Mike - please know that not everyone who appreciates ARC feels the same way as the GP. I'm not an academic researcher but I am quite sensitive to hype and excessive marketing. I've never felt the ARC site was anything other than appropriately professional.

Even revisiting it now, I don't see anything wrong with being concisely clear and even a little provocative in stating your case on your own site. Especially since a key value of ARC is getting more objectively grounded regarding progress toward AGI. On top of that ARC is "A non-profit for the public advancement of open artificial general intelligence" that you guys are personally donating serious money and time to that's helping a field where a lot of entrepreneurs are going to make money and academics are going to advance their careers.

My perception is ARC tried it the other way for years but a lot of academics and AI pundits ignored or dismissed it without ever meaningfully engaging with it. "Sharpening" the message this year has clearly paid off in bringing attention that's shifted the conversation and is helping advance progress toward AGI in ways nothing else has. I also greatly appreciate the time and care you and Francois have put into making the ARC proposition clear enough for non-technical people to understand. That's hard to do and doesn't happen by accident.

Personally, I've found ARC valuable in the real world outside of academia and domain experts because it provides a conceptually simple starting place to discuss with non-technical people what the term AGI might even mean. My high school-aged daughter asked me about vague AGI impending doom scenarios she heard on TikTok. I had her solve a couple ARC samples and then pointed out that today's best AIs aren't yet close to doing the same. This counter-intuitive revelation got her pondering the "Why?" which led to a deep discussion about the multi-dimensional breadth of human creativity and an appreciation of the many ways artificial intelligences might differ from human intelligence.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> My perception is ARC tried it the other way for years but a lot of academics and AI pundits ignored or dismissed it without ever meaningfully engaging with it.

Your perception is very wrong and the likely reason is that as you say you're not an academic researcher. ARC made a huge splash with the original Kaggle competition a few years ago and it drew in exactly the kind of "academic researcher" you seem to be pointing to: those in university research groups who do not have access to the data and compute that the big tech companies have, and who can consequently not compete in the usual big data benchmarks that are dominated by Google, OpenAI, Meta, and friends. ARC, with its (unfair) few-shot tasks and constantly changing private test set, is exactly the kind of dataset that that kind of researcher are looking for, something that is relatively safe from big tech deep neural nets. Even the $1 million prize seems specially designed to be just enough to draw in that crowd of not super-rich academics while leaving corporate research groups insufficiently motivated.

Besides which, I won't name names but one of the principal researchers in the winning system is just one of those academics. I don't know which is the period you mean ARC was ignored by the academic community but that particular researcher was in a certain meeting of like-minded academics two years ago where one of the main areas of discussion was in short "how to beat ARC and show that our stuff works".