I think a lot of people got discouraged, seeing how openai solved arc agi 1 by what seems like brute forcing and throwing money at it. Do you believe arc was solved in the "spirit" of the challenge? Also all the open sourced solutions seem super specific to solving arc. Is this really leading us to human level AI at open ended tasks?
I'd encourage you to review the definition of "brute force", and then consider the absolutely immense combinatoric space represented by the grids these puzzles use.
"Brute force" simply cannot touch these puzzles. An amount of understanding and pattern recognition is strictly required, even with the large quantities of test-time compute that were used against arc-agi-1.
It's useful to know what current AI systems can achieve with unlimited test-time compute resources. Ultimately though, the "spirit of the challenge" is efficiency, which is why we're specifically looking for solutions that are at least within 1-2 order of magnitude of cost from being competitive with humans. The Kaggle leaderboard is very resource-constrained, and on the public leaderboard you need to use less than $10,000 in compute to solve 120 tasks.
And it's also irrelevant in some fields. If you solve a "protein folding" problem that was a blocker for a pharma company, that 10k is peanuts now.
Same for coding. If you can spend 100$ / hr on a "mid-level" SWE agent but you can literally spawn 100 today and 0 tomorrow and reach your clients faster, again the cost is irrelevant.
Are you in the process of creating tasks that behave as an acid test for AGI? If not, do you think such a task is feasible? I read somewhere in the ARC blog that they define AGI as when creating tasks that is hard for AI but easy for humans becomes virtually impossible.
I don't think that's correct. They had 400 people receive some questions, and only kept the questions that were solved by at least 2 people. The 400 people didn't all receive 120 questions (they'd have probably got bored).
If you go through the example problems you'll notice that most are testing the "aha" moment. Once you do a couple, you know what to expect, but with larger grids you have to stay focused and keep track of a few things to get it right.
The "select" tool gives some help with tasks that require counting or copying. You can select areas of the input, which will show their dimensions, and copy-paste them into the output (ctrl+c/ctrl+v).