[NitpickLawyer]

> but you'll know it when you see it.

I agree, but with the caveat that it's getting harder and harder with all the hype / doom cycles and all the goalpost moving that's happening in this space.

IMO if you took gemini2.5 / claude / o3 and showed it to people from ten / twenty years ago, they'd say that it is unmistakably AGI.

[bayarearefugee]

There's no way to be sure in either case, but I suspect their impressions of the technology ten or twenty years ago would be not so different from my experience of first using LLMs a few years ago...

Which is to say complete amazement followed quickly by seeing all the many ways in which it absolutely falls flat on its face revealing the lack of actual thinking, which is a situation that hasn't fundamentally changed since then.

[HdS84]

Yes, thar is the same feelingg I have. Giving it some json and describe how a website should look? Super fast results and amazing capabilities. Trying to get it to translate my unit tests from Xunit to Tunit, where the latter is new and does not have a ton of blog posts? Forget about it. The process is purely mechanical and it is easy after RTFM, but it falls flat on its face

[Closi]

Although I think if you asked people 20 years ago to describe a test for something AGI would do, they would be more likely to say “writing a poem” or “making art” than “turning Xunit code to Tunit”

IMO I think if you said to someone in the 90s “well we invented something that can tell jokes, make unique art, write stories and hold engaging conversations, although we haven’t yet reached AGI because it can’t transpile code accurately - I mean it can write full applications if you give it some vague requirements, but they have to be reasonably basic, like only the sort of thing a junior dev could write in a day it can write in 20 seconds, so not AGI” they would say “of course you have invented AGI, are you insane!!!”.

LLMs to me are still a technology of pure science fiction come to life before our eyes!

[Jensson]

Tell them humans need to babysit it and doublecheck its answers to do anything since it isn't as reliable as a human then no they wouldn't call it an AGI back then either.

The whole point about AGI is that it is general like a human, if it has such glaring weaknesses as the current AI has it isn't AGI, it was the same back then. That an AGI can write a poem doesn't mean being able to write a poem makes it an AGI, its just an example the AI couldn't do 20 years ago.

[Closi]

Why do human programmers need code review then if they are intelligent?

And why can’t expert programmers deploy code without testing it? Surely they should just be able to write it perfectly first time without errors if they were actually intelligent.

[Jensson]

> Why do human programmers need code review then if they are intelligent?

Human programmers don't need code reviews, they can test things themselves. Code reviews is just an optimization to scale up it isn't a requirement to make programs.

Also the AGI is allowed to let another AGI code review it, the point is there shouldn't be a human in the loop.

> And why can’t expert programmers deploy code without testing it?

Testing it can be done by themselves, the AGI model is allowed to test its own things as well.

[Jensson]

> IMO if you took gemini2.5 / claude / o3 and showed it to people from ten / twenty years ago, they'd say that it is unmistakably AGI.

No they wouldn't, since those still can't replace human white collar workers even at many very basic tasks.

Once AGI is here most white collar jobs are gone, you'd only need to hire geniuses at most.

[zaptrem]

Which part of "General Intelligence" requires replacing white collar workers? A middle schooler has general intelligence (they know about and can do a lot of things across a lot of different areas) but they likely can't replace white collar workers either. IMO GPT-3 was AGI, just a pretty crappy one.

[Jensson]

> A middle schooler has general intelligence (they know about and can do a lot of things across a lot of different areas) but they likely can't replace white collar workers either.

Middle schoolers replace white collars workers all the time, it takes 10 years for them to do it but they can do it.

No current model can do the same since they aren't able to learn over time like a middle schooler.

[sebastiennight]

Compared to someone who graduated middle school on November 30th, 2022 (2.5 years ago, would you say that today's gemini 2.5 pro has NOT gained intelligence faster?

I mean, if you're a CEO or middle manager and you have the choice of hiring this middle schooler for general office work, or today's gemini-2.5-pro, are you 100% saying the ex-middle-schooler is definitely going to give you best bang for your buck?

Assuming you can either pay them $100k a year, or spend the $100k on gemini inference.

[Jensson]

> would you say that today's gemini 2.5 pro has NOT gained intelligence faster?

Gemini 2.5 pro the model has not gained any intelligence since it is a static model.

New models are not the models learning, it is humans creating new models. The models trained has access to all the same material and knowledge a middle schooler has as they go on to learn how to do a job, yet they fail to learn the job while the kid succeeds.

[ben_w]

> Gemini 2.5 pro the model has not gained any intelligence since it is a static model.

Surely that's an irrelevant distinction, from the point of view of a hiring manager?

If a kid takes ten years from middle school to being worth hiring, then the question is "what new AI do you expect will exist in 10 years?"

How the model comes to be, doesn't matter. Is it a fine tune on more training data from your company docs and/or an extra decade of the internet? A different architecture? A different lab in a different country?

Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter for the same reason you didn't hire the kid immediately out of middle school, and hired someone else who had already had another decade to learn more in the meantime.

Doesn't matter for the same reason that different flesh humans aren't perfectly substitutable.

You pay to solve a problem, not to specifically have a human solve it. Today, not in ten years when today's middle schooler graduates from university.

And that's even though I agree that AI today doesn't learn effectively from as few examples as humans need.

[sebastiennight]

This argument needlessly anthropomorphizes the models. They are not humans nor living entities, they are systems.

So, fine, the gemini-2.5-pro model hasn't gotten more intelligent. What about the "Google AI Studio API" as a system? Or the "OpenAI chat completions API" as a system?

This system has definitely gotten vastly smarter based on the input it's gotten. Would you now concede, that if we look at the API-level (which, by the way, is the way you as the employer do interact with it) then this entity has gotten smarter way faster than the middle-schooler in the last 2.5 years?

[ac29]

> Gemini 2.5 pro the model has not gained any intelligence since it is a static model.

Aren't all the people interacting with it on aistudio helping the next Gemini model learn though?

Sure, the results of that wont be available until the next model is released, but it seems to me that human interaction/feedback is actually a vital part of LLM training.

[sebastiennight]

I don't think so, and here's my simple proof:

You and I could sit behind a keyboard, role-playing as the AI in a reverse Turing test, typing away furiously at the top of our game, and if you told someone that their job is to assess our performance (thinking they're interacting with a computer), they would still conclude that we are definitely not AGI.

This is a battle that can't be won at any point because it's a matter of faith for the forever-skeptic, not facts.

[Jensson]

> I don't think so, and here's my simple proof:

That isn't a proof since you haven't ran that test, it is just a thought experiment.

[ben_w]

I've been accused a few times of being an AI, even here.

(Have you not experienced being on the recieving end of such accusations? Or do I just write weird?)

I think this demonstrates the same point.

[Jensson]

> Have you not experienced being on the recieving end of such accusations?

No, I have not been accused of being an AI. I have seen people who format their texts get accused due to the formatting sometimes, and thought people could accuse me for the same reason, but that doesn't count.

> I think this demonstrates the same point.

You can't detect general intelligence from a single message, so it doesn't really. People accuse you for being an AI based on the structure and word usage of your message, not the content of it.

[ben_w]

> People accuse you for being an AI based on the structure and word usage of your message, not the content of it.

If that's the real cause, it is not the reason they give when making the accusation. Sometimes they object to the citations, sometimes the absence of them.

But it's fairly irrelevant, as they are, in fact, saying that real flesh-and-blood me doesn't pass their purity test for thinking.

Is that because they're not thinking? Doesn't matter — as @sebastiennight said: "This is a battle that can't be won at any point because it's a matter of faith for the forever-skeptic, not facts."

[Jensson]

So is your argument is that all skeptics are unreasonable people that can't ever be convinced based on being called an AI once? Don't you see who is the unreasonable one here?

There are always people that wont admit they are wrong, but most people do come around when presented with overwhelming evidence, it has happened many times in history and most people switches to new technology very quickly when its good enough.

[mac-mc]

When it can replace a polite, diligent, experienced 120 IQ human in all tasks. So it has a consistent long-term narrative memory, doesn't "lose the plot" as you interact longer and longer with it, can pilot robots to do physical labor without much instruction (what is current state of the art is not that, a trained human will still do much better, can drive cars, etc), generate images without goofy non-human style errors, etc.

[NitpickLawyer]

> experienced 120 IQ human in all tasks.

Well, that's 91th percentile already. I know the terms are hazy, but that seems closer to ASI than AGI from that perspective, no?

I think I do agree with you on the other points.

[ben_w]

Indeed, on both. Even IQ 85 would make a painful dent in the economy via unemployment statistics. But the AI we have now is spikey, in ways that make it trip up over mistakes even slighly below average humans would not make, even though it can also do Maths Olympiad puzzles, the bar exam, leetcode, etc.

[mac-mc]

The emotional way that humans think when buying products is similarly unfair. Only the 90th percentile is truly 'satisfactory'. The implied question is when would Joe Average and everyone else stop moving the goal posts to the question, "Do we have AI yet"?

ASI is, by definition, Superintelligence, which means it is beyond practical human IQ capacity. So something like 200 IQ.

Again, you might call it 'unfair', but that's when it will also stop having goal posts being moved; otherwise, Joe Midwit will call it 'it's only as smart as some smart dudes I know'.