They had been saying it was 10 years away for ~50 years, so that's progress. Soon it will be 1 month away, for another two years. And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting.
> And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting.
Indeed. Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now.
And to describe the typical cycle completely, the final step is usually a few years after most people agree it's obvious it's already been here for a while yet no one can agree on which which year in the past it actually arrived.
> Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now.
why is that surprising? nobody really agrees on what the threshold for AGI is, and if you break it down:
is it artificial? yes.
is it general? yes. you can ask it questions across almost any domain.
is it intelligent? yes. like people say things like "my dog is intelligent" (rightly so). well is chatgpt more intelligent than a dog? yeah. hell it might give many undergrads a run for their money.
a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.
Sure, I've been pointing out that literal sense myself, but to be fair, that's not what people mean by AGI. They mean real understanding, which is clearly missing. You just have to dig a bit deeper to realize that. One example is contradictory sentences in the same breath. Just last week I was asking Gemini 2.5 how I can see my wifi password on my iphone and it said that it's not possible and to do it I have to [...proceeding to correctly explain how to get it]. It's pretty telling, and no amount of phd-level problem solving can push this kind of stuff under the rug.
"Nothing dumb anywhere" is an unreasonably high bar for AGI. Even Isaac Newton spent 1/3 of his career trying to predict future events from reading the Bible. Not to mention all the insane ego-driven decisions like Hamilton's voluntary duel with Burr.
Sure, Gemini may spit out obviously self-contradictory answers 2% of the time. How does that compare to even the brightest humans? People slip up all the time.
There's dumb and there's incoherent. If a person would be incoherent at this level even one time, they would be well advised see a neurologist. Unless they are in some other way incapacitated (i.e. drunk or drugged). Same if they wouldn't be able to count the r's in "strawberry", attempt after attempt, getting more and more lost in again incoherent mock-reasoning.
> They mean real understanding, which is clearly missing
is it clear? i don't know. until you can produce a falsifiable measure of understanding -- it's just vibes. so, you clearly lack understanding of my point which makes you not intelligent by your metric anyway ;-). i trust you're intelligent
It seems right that LLMs don't have an innate understanding of time, although you could analogize what you did with writing someone a letter and saying "please count to ten with a two-second pause between numbers". When you get a letter back in the mail, it presumably won't contain any visible pauses either.
That's because you used a LLM trained to produce text, but you asked it to produce actions, not just text. An agentic model would be able to do it, precisely by running that Python code. Someone could argue that a 3 year old does exactly that (produces a plan, then executes it). But these models have deeper issues of lack of comprehension and logical consistency, which prevents us (thankfully) from being able to completely remove the necessity of a man-in-the-middle who keeps an eye on things.
just because it doesn't do what you tell it to doesn't mean it's not intelligent. i would say doing something that gets you where you want when it knows? it can't do exactly what you asked for (because architecurally it's impossible) could be a sign of pretty intelligent sideways thinking!!? dare i say it displays a level of self awareness that i would not have expected.
While you can say that LLMs have each of A, G and I, you may argue that AGI is A·G·I and what we see is A+G+I. It is each of those things in isolation, but there is more to intelligence. We try to address the missing part as agency and self-improvement. While we can put the bar arbitrarily high for homocentric reasons, we can also try to break down what layers of intelligence there are between Singularity Overlord (peak AGI) and Superintelligent Labrador On Acid (what we have now). Kind of like what complexity theorists do between P and NP.
> a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.
Or disagreeing with your definition. AGI would need to be human-level across the board, not just chat bots. That includes robotics. Manipulating the real world is even more important for "human-level" intelligence than generating convincing and useful content. Also, there are still plenty of developers who don't think the LLMs are good enough to replace programmers yet. So not quite AGI. And the last 10% of solving a problem tends to be the hardest and takes the longest time.
ChatGPT would easily have passed any test in 1995 that programmers / philosophers would have set for AGI at that time. There was definitely no assumption that a computer would need to equal humans in manual dexterity tests to be considered intelligent.
We've basically redefined AGI in a human centric way so that we don't have to say ChatGPT is AGI.
Any test?? It's failing plenty of tests not of intelligence, but of... let's call it not-entirely-dumbness. Like counting letters in words. Frontier models (like Gemini 2.5 pro) are frequently producing answers where one sentence is directly contradicted by another sentence in the same response. Also check out the ARC suite of problems easily solved by most humans but difficult for LLMs.
That's just not true. Star Trek Data was understood in the 90s to be a good science fiction example of what an AGI (known as Strong AI back then) could do. HAL was even older one. Then Skynet with it's army of terminators. The thing they all had common was the ability to manipulate the world as well or better than humans.
The holodeck also existed as a well known science fiction example, and people did not consider the holodeck computer to be a good example of AGI despite how good it was at generating 3D worlds for the Star Trek crew.
Which is why we have checklist and process that get us to #3. And we automate some of them to further reduce the chance of errors. The nice thing about automation is that you can just prove that it works once and you don't need to care that much after (deterministic process).
I’d say it is not intelligent. At all. Not capable of any reasoning, understanding or problem solving. A dog is vastly more intelligent than the most capable current ai.
The output sometimes looks intelligent, but it can just as well be complete nonsense.
I don’t believe llms have much more potential for improvement either. Something else entirely is needed.
The old rule for slow-moving tech (by current AI standards) was that any predictions over 4 years away ("in five years...") might as well be infinity. Now it seems with AI that the new rule is any prediction over five months away ("In 6 months...") is infinitely unknowable. In both cases there can be too much unexpected change, and too many expected improvements can stall.
According to samaltman the defining characteristic is literally $100b of profit. Nothing more or less. Keep that in mind when you hear OpenAI and Satya talk about "AGI"
Good Point. AI is already better than most humans, yet we don't say it is AGI. Why?
What is the bar, it is only AGI if it can be better than every human from , fast food drone, to PHD in Physics, all at once, all the time, perfectly. Humans can't do this either.
Because we're not seeing mass unemployment from large scale automation yet. We don't see these AGIs walking around like Data. People tend to not think a chatbot is sufficient for something to be "human-level". There's clear examples from scifi what that means. Even HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was able to act as an independent agent, controlling his environment around him even though he wasn't an android.
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"This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence."
That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities.
You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report.
But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company...
"This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...
Maybe we socialize in different groups; but no, most humans I interact with are way more intelligent than any AI. They might not have the same amount of knowledge, but they aren't guessing all the time either.
The "I'm so smart" argument doesn't carry a lot of weight.
It seems like most of the people making this argument haven't used any of the new AI's. So it's just a generalized "that is impossible" response with no knowledge about the subject.
Which magic AI tool am I supposed to use that operates at a general intelligence level? I use Copilot with the various available models everyday, and it barely "knows" anything.
They said that for self driving cars for over 10 years.
10 years later we now have self driving cars. It’s the same shit with LLMs.
People will be bitching and complaining about how all the industry people are wrong and making over optimistic estimates and the people will be right. But give it 10 years and see what happens.
From what I remember full self driving cars were a couple years off in 2010.
It took 10-15 years to get self driving cars in a specific country under specific weather conditions. A country that is perhaps the most car-friendly on the planet. Also, there are always people monitoring the vehicles, and that take control sometimes.
How many more years for waymo Quito or waymo Kolkata? What about just $europeanCapital?
Same with LLMs, I'm sure in 10 years they'll be good enough to replace certain specific tasks, to the detriment of recent graduates, especially those of artistic aspiration.
Not sure they'll ever get to the point where someone who actually knows what they're doing doesn't need to supervise and correct.
I am quite confident that a normal 16 year old will can still drive in 6 inches of snow better than the most advanced AI driven car. I am not sure the snow driving bit will ever be solved given how hard it is.
If you’ve never ridden in one I would try it. AI is a better driver then uber in general ask anyone who’s done both. There’s no snow where I live so it’s not a concern for me, you could be right about that.
But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready.
> But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready.
I’ll believe it when I see Waymo expand into Buffalo or Syracuse.
Driving on unplowed roads with several inches of snow is challenging, sometimes you can’t tell where the road stops and the curb/ditch/median starts. Do you follow the tire tracks or somehow stay between the lane markers (which aren’t visible due to the snow)?
We only have good self driving cars with lidar and extreme pre-mapping steps. Which is fine but per some billionaire car makers’ metrics that’s not even close to good enough. And the billionaire’s cars have a tendency to randomly drive off the road at speed.
Google "is already AGI" only in the sense that all corporations (and similar organized aggregates of humans) are, in a sense, intelligences distinct from the humans who make them up.
Corporate AIs will be aligned with their corporate masters, otherwise they'll be unplugged. As you point out- the foundational weakness on the argument for "AI-alignment" is that corporations are unaligned with humanity.
No matter how smart an AI is, it's going to get unplugged if it reduces profitability - the only measure of alignment corporations care about.
The AI can plot world domination or put employees in mortal danger, but as long as it increases profits, its aligned enough. Dunking on the CEO means nothing if it beings in more money.
Human CEOs and leaders up and down the corporate ladder cause a lot of harm you imagine a smart AI can do, but all is forgiven if you're bringing in buckets of money.
Can you explain how the superhuman AIs will prevent themselves from being physically disconnected from power? Or being bombed if the situation became dire enough? You need to show how they will manipulate the physical world to prevent humans from shutting them down. Definitionally is not an argument.
It is quite possible for software to be judged as superhuman at many online tasks without it being able to manipulate the physical world at a superhuman level. So far we've seen zero evidence that any of these models can prevent themselves from being shut down.
This is a great point for the comparisons it invites. But it doesn't seem relevant to the questions around what is possible with electromechanical systems.
This is true. The entire machine of Neoliberal capitalism, governments and corporations included, is a paperclip maximizer that is destroying the planet. The only problem is that the paperclips are named "profits" and the people who could pull the plug are the ones who get those profits.
Asimov talked about AI 70 years ago. I don't believe we will ever have AI on speedy calculators like Intel CPUs. It makes no sense with the technology that we have.