[tim333]

Maybe we could do with a new term. I mean "general intelligence" is pretty vague and could apply to all sorts of stuff.

Re "momentous milestone, ... obvious when it has been built" personally I think a major point is when the AIs could keep running the world without us, including building energy plants, chip factories and so on. AI independence maybe?

I think they are wrong on "AGI won't be a shock to the economy because diffusion takes decades" - ChatGPT reached 100m users in 2 months. These things can happen quickly.

[AIPedant]

It should be more discussed that LLM progress had almost nothing to do with building energy plants and whatnot:

  Whereas early AGI proponents believed that machines would soon take on all human activities, researchers have learned the hard way that creating AI systems that can beat you at chess or answer your search queries is a lot easier than building a robot to fold your laundry or fix your plumbing. The definition of AGI was adjusted accordingly to include only so-called “cognitive tasks.” DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis defines AGI as a system that “should be able to do pretty much any cognitive task that humans can do,” and OpenAI describes it as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” where “most” leaves out tasks requiring the physical intelligence that will likely elude robots for some time.

(via this excellent Melanie Mitchell essay https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado7069)

Transformer-powered robots still seem exceptionally stupid compared to frogs, bees, etc.

Re the shock comment - it is difficult to argue that ChatGPT has actually changed the economy much, despite widespread adoption. Overheated tech stocks, dev tooling, better scammers, better academic cheaters, etc are not exactly an industrial revolution. And frankly for many users it is more of a toy than a useful tool, e.g. the Studio Ghibli fad.