[qoez]

I feel like I'm the only one who isn't convinced getting a high score on the ARC eval test means we have AGI. It's mostly about pattern matching (and some of it ambiguous even for humans what the actual true response aught to be). It's like how in humans there's lots of different 'types' of intelligence, and just overfitting on IQ tests doesn't in my mind convince me a person is actually that smart.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Getting a high score on ARC doesn't mean we have AGI and Chollet has always said as much AFAIK, it's meant to push the AI research space in a positive direction. Being able to solve ARC problems is probably a pre-requisite to AGI. It's a directional push into the fog of war, with the claim being that we should explore that area because we expect it's relevant to building AGI.

[lostphilosopher]

We don't really have a true test that means "if we pass this test we have AGI" but we have a variety of tests (like ARC) that we believe any true AGI would be able to pass. It's a "necessary but not sufficient" situation. Also ties directly to the challenge in defining what AGI really means. You see a lot of discussions of "moving the goal posts" around AGI, but as I see it we've never had goal posts, we've just got a bunch of lines we'd expect to cross before reaching them.

[MPSimmons]

I don't think we actually even have a good definition of "This is what AGI is, and here are the stationary goal posts that, when these thresholds are met, then we will have AGI".

If you judged human intelligence by our AI standards, then would humans even pass as Natural General Intelligence? Human intelligence tests are constantly changing, being invalidated, and rerolled as well.

I maintain that today's modern LLMs would pass sufficiently for AGI and is also very close to passing a Turing Test, if measured in 1950 when the test was proposed.

[fasterik]

>I don't think we actually even have a good definition of "This is what AGI is, and here are the stationary goal posts that, when these thresholds are met, then we will have AGI".

Not only do we not have that, I don't think it's possible to have it.

Philosophers have known about this problem for centuries. Wittgenstein recognized that most concepts don't have precise definitions but instead behave more like family resemblances. When we look at a family we recognize that they share physical characteristics, even if there's no single characteristic shared by all of them. They don't need to unanimously share hair color, skin complexion, mannerisms, etc. in order to have a family resemblance.

Outside of a few well-defined things in logic and mathematics, concepts operate in the same way. Intelligence isn't a well-defined concept, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about different types of human intelligence, non-human animal intelligence, or machine intelligence in terms of family resemblances.

Benchmarks are useful tools for assessing relative progress on well-defined tasks. But the decision of what counts as AGI will always come down to fuzzy comparisons and qualitative judgments.

[QuadmasterXLII]

The current definition and goal of AGI is “Artificial intelligence good enough to replace every employee for cheaper” and much of the difficulty people have in defining it is cognitive dissonance about the goal.

[jenadine]

Or this definition of AGI from OpenAI and Microsoft:

> [AGI is achieved when] AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

[aktuel]

That is a truly retarded definition. And so revealing. Just perfect quant slop.

[drdeca]

I’d remove the “for cheaper” part? (And also, only necessary for the employees whose jobs are “cognitive tasks”, not ones that are based on their bodies. So like, doesn’t need to be able to lift boxes or have a nice smile.)

If something would be better at every cognitive task than every human, if it ran a trillion times faster, I would consider that to be AGI even if it isn’t that useful at its actual speed.

[goatlover]

Because an important part of being a Natural general Intelligence is having a body and interacting with the world. Data from Star Trek is a good example of an AGI.

[fragmede]

Given the actions of Data's brother, I think Data qualifies as a benevolent ASI.

[fvdessen]

Turing test is not really that meaningful anymore because you can always detect the AI by text and timing patterns rather than actual intelligence. In fact the most reliable way to test for AI is probably to ask trivia questions on various niche topics, I don't think any human has as much breath of general knowledge as current AIs.

[staunton]

> you can always detect the AI by text and timing patterns

I see no reason why an AI couldn't be trained on human data to fake all of that.

If noone has bothered so far, that's because pretty much all commercial applications of this would be illegal or at least leading to major reputational damage when exposed.

[programd]

You may want to look at this: A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09215-4

[batmansmk]

One of the very first slides of François’ presentation is about defining AGI. Do you have anything that opposes his synthesis of the two (50 years old) takes on this definition?

[tedy1996]

I have graduated with a degree in Software engineering and i am bilingual (Bulgarian and English). Currently AI is better than me in everything except adding big numbers or writing code in really niche topics - for example code golfing a Brainfuck interpreter or writing a Rubiks cube solver. I believe AGI has been here for at least a year now.

[fvdessen]

I suggest you to try to let the AI think through race conditions scenarios in asynchronous programs; it is not that good at these abstract reasoning tasks.

[jcelerier]

the huge majority of humans aren't either though

[goatlover]

Can the AI wash your dishes, fold your laundry, take out your trash, meet a friend for dinner or the other thousand things you might do in an average day when you're not interacting with text on a screen?

You know stuff that humans have done way before there were computers and screens.

[umeshunni]

Yeah, I'm convinced that the biggest difference between the current generation of AIs we have and humans is that AIs don't have the range of tool use and interaction with the physical environment that humans do. And that's what's actually holding AGI back not access to more data.

[amanaplanacanal]

Yes that, plus an inability to learn because it has no memory. If you correct it today, will it remember the correction next week, or next year?

[cubefox]

> Getting a high score on ARC doesn't mean we have AGI and Chollet has always said as much AFAIK

He only seems to say this recently, since OpenAI cracked the ARC-AGI benchmark. But in the original 2019 abstract he said this:

> We argue that ARC can be used to measure a human-like form of general fluid intelligence and that it enables fair general intelligence comparisons between AI systems and humans.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

Now he seems to backtrack, with the release of harder ARC-like benchmarks, implying that the first one didn't actually test for really general human-like intelligence.

This sounds a bit like saying that a machine beating chess would require general intelligence -- but then adding, after Deep Blue beats chess, that chess doesn't actually count as a test for AGI, and that Go is the real AGI benchmark. And after a narrow system beats Go, moving the goalpost to beating Atari, and then to beating StarCraft II, then to MineCraft, etc.

At some point, intuitively real "AGI" will be necessary to beat one of these increasingly difficult benchmarks, but only because otherwise yet another benchmark would have been invented. Which makes these benchmarks mostly post hoc rationalizations.

A better approach would be to question what went wrong with coming up with the very first benchmark, and why a similar thing wouldn't occur with the second.

[whattheheckheck]

Okay, true AGI would solve the coordination problem for all humans everywhere and usher in a post scarcity utopia. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

We can simply check the news every day until it's built...

[fragmede]

That's ASI, artificial super intelligence, not AGI.

[cubefox]

More precisely, it's value-aligned ASI.

[solarwindy]

Relative to humans, these models sure have ungodly amounts of knowledge, but they also kinda have a lobotomy, in never having moved through the world. It’s remarkable they work as well as they do trained chiefly on text, but being so untethered from the only reality we know intelligence to have emerged from... frankly, what do we expect?

[kordlessagain]

ARC is definitely about achieving AGI and it doesn't matter whether we "have" it or not right now. That is the goal:

> where he introduced the "Abstract and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence" (ARC-AGI) benchmark to measure intelligence

So, a high enough score is a threshold to claim AGI. And, if you use an LLM to work these types of problems, it becomes pretty clear that passing more tests indicates a level of "awareness" that goes beyond rational algorithms.

I thought I had seen everything until I started working on some of the problems with agents. I'm still sorta in awe about how the reasoning manifests. (And don't get me wrong, LLMs like Claude still go completely off the rails where even a less intelligent human would know better.)

[MPSimmons]

>a high enough score is a threshold to claim AGI

I'm pretty sure he said that AGI would achieve a high score, not that a high score was indicative of AGI

[ummonk]

"Being able to solve ARC problems is probably a pre-requisite to AGI." - is it? Humans have general intelligence and most can't solve the harder ARC problems.

[singron]

https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

"Avg. Mturker" has 77% on ARC1 and costs $3/task. "Stem Grad" has 98% on ARC1 and costs $10/task. I would love a segment like "typical US office employee" or something else in between since I don't think you need a stem degree to do better than 77%.

It's also worth noting the "Human Panel" gets 100% on ARC2 at $17/task. All the "Human" models are on the score/cost frontier and exceptional in their score range although too expensive to win the prize obviously.

I think the real argument is that the ARC problems are too abstract and obscure to be relevant to useful AGI, but I think we need a little flexibility in that area so we can have tests that can be objectively and mechanically graded. E.g. "write a NYT bestseller" is an impractical test in many ways even if it's closer to what AGI should be.

[tbrownaw]

> I think the real argument is that the ARC problems are too abstract and obscure to be relevant to useful AGI

I think it's meant to work like how getting things off the top shelf at the supermarket isn't relevant to playing basketball.

[adastra22]

They, and the other posters posting similar things, don't mean human-like intelligence, or even the rigorously defined solving of unconstrained problem spaces that originally defined Artificial General Intelligence (in contrast to "narrow" intelligence").

They mean an artificial god, and it has become a god of the gaps: we have made artificial general intelligence, and it is more human-like than god-like, and so to make a god we must have it do XYZ precisely because that is something which people can't do.

[ummonk]

Right, but there is a very clear term for that which they should be using: ASI

[adastra22]

Agree, and you shouldn't be downvoted. It is a pet peeve of me as well.

[satellite2]

Didn't he say that 70% in a random sample of the population should get it right?

[echelon]

My problem with AGI is the lack of a simple, concrete definition.

Can we formalize it as giving out a task expressible in, say, n^m bytes of information that encodes a task of n^(m+q) real algorithmic and verification complexity -- then solving that task within a certain time, compute, and attempt bounds?

Something that captures "the AI was able to unwind the underlying unspoken complexity of the novel problem".

I feel like one could map a variety of easy human "brain teaser" type tasks to heuristics that fit within some mathematical framework and then grow the formalism from there.

[glenstein]

>My problem with AGI is the lack of a simple, concrete definition.

You can't always start from definitions. There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, consciousness, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.

I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.

[apwell23]

one of those cases where defining it and solving it is the same. If you know how to define it then you've solved it.

[kordlessagain]

After researching this a fair amount, my opinion is that consciousness/intelligence (can you have one without the other?) emerges from some sort of weird entropy exchange in domains in the brain. The theory goes that we aren't conscious, but we DO consciousness, sometimes. Maybe entropy, or the inverse of it, gives way to intelligence, somehow.

This entropy angle has real theoretical backing. Some researchers propose consciousness emerges from the brain's ability to integrate information across different scales and timeframes. This would essentially create temporary "islands of low entropy" in neural networks. Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory suggests consciousness corresponds to a system's ability to generate integrated information, which relates to how it reduces uncertainty (entropy) about its internal states. Then there is Hammeroff and Penrose, which I commented about on here years ago and got blasted for it. Meh. I'm a learner, and I learn by entertaining truths. But I always remain critical of theories until I'm sold.

I'm not selling any of this as a truth, because the fact remains we have no idea what "consciousness" is. We have a better handle on "intelligence", but as others point out, most humans aren't that intelligent. They still manage to drive to the store and feed their dogs, however.

A lot of the current leading ARC solutions use random sampling, which sorta makes sense once you start thinking about having to handle all the different types of problems. At least it seems to be helping out in paring down the decision tree.

[cornel_io]

I'm all for benchmarks that push the field forward, but ARC problems seem to be difficult for reasons having less to do with intelligence and more about having a text system that works reliably with rasterized pixel data presented line by line. Most people would score 0 on it if they were shown the data the way an LLM sees it, these problems only seem easy to us because there are visualizers slapped on top.

[solarwindy]

What is a visualisation?

Our rod and cone cells could just as well be wired up in any other configuration you care to imagine. And yet, an organisation or mapping that preserves spatial relationships has been strongly preferred over billions of years of evolution, allowing us most easily to make sense of the world. Put another way, spatial feature detectors have emerged as an incredible versatile substrate for ‘live-action’ generation of world models.

What do we do when we visualise, then? We take abstract relationships (in data, in a conceptual framework, whatever) and map them in a structure-preserving way to an embodiment (ink on paper, pixels on screen) that can wind its way through our perceptual machinery that evolved to detect spatial relationships. That is, we leverage our highly developed capability for pattern matching in the visual domain to detect patterns that are not necessarily visual at all, but which nevertheless have some inherent structure that is readily revealed that way.

What does any of this entail for machine intelligence?

On the one hand, if a problem has an inherent spatial logic to it, then it ought to have good learning gradients in the direction of a spatial organisation of the raw input. So, if specifically training for such a problem, the serialisation probably doesn’t much matter.

On the other hand: expecting a language model to generalise to inherently spatial reasoning? I’m totally with you. Why should we expect good performance?

No clue how the unification might be achieved, but I’d wager that language + action-prediction models will be far more capable than models grounded in language alone. After all, what does ‘cat’ mean to a language model that’s never seen one pounce and purr and so on? (Pictures don’t really count.)

[davidclark]

In the video, François Chollet, creator of the ARC benchmarks, says that beating ARC does not equate to AGI. He specifically says they will be able to be beaten without AGI.

[cubefox]

He only says this because otherwise he would have to say that

- OpenAI's o3 counts as "AGI" when it did unexpectedly beat the ARC-AGI benchmark or

- Explicitly admit that he was wrong when assuming that ARC-AGI would test for AGI

[sweezyjeezy]

FWIW the original ARC was published in 2019, just after GPT-2 but a while before GPT-3. I work in the field, I think that discussing AGI seriously is actually kind of a recent thing (I'm not sure I ever heard the term 'AGI' until a few years ago). I'm not saying I know he didn't feel that, but he doesn't talk in such terms in the original paper.

[cubefox]

> We argue that ARC can be used to measure a human-like form of general fluid intelligence and that it enables fair general intelligence comparisons between AI systems and humans.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

[davidclark]

> It is important to note that ARC is a work in progress, not a definitive solution; it does not fit all of the requirements listed in II.3.2, and it features a number of key weaknesses…

Page 53

> The study of general artificial intelligence is a field still in its infancy, and we do not wish to convey the impression that we have provided a definitive solution to the problem of characterizing and measuring the intelligence held by an AI system.

Page 56

[Davidzheng]

It's in the OpenAI charter...

[yorwba]

I think the people behind the ARC Prize agree that getting a high score doesn't mean we have AGI. (They already updated the benchmark once to make it harder.) But an AGI should get a similarly high score as humans do. So current models that get very low scores are definitely not AGI, and likely quite far away from it.

[cubefox]

> I think the people behind the ARC Prize agree that getting a high score doesn't mean we have AGI

The benchmark was literally called ARC-AGI. Only after OpenAI cracked it, they started backtracking and saying that it doesn't test for true AGI. Which undermines the whole premise of a benchmark.

[yorwba]

It does test for AGI. For its absence.

[cubefox]

I would call something as intelligent as an animal an AGI. They are very general (as opposed to narrow) intelligences, just not necessarily very smart ones. ARC-AGI arguably conflates these two dimensions.

[energy123]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

But on a serious note, I don't think Chollet would disagree. ARC is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and he says that, despite the unfortunate attention-grabbing name choice of the benchmark. I like Chollet's view that we will know that AGI is here when we can't come up with new benchmarks that separate humans from AI.

[gonzobonzo]

I agree with you but I'll go a step further - these benchmarks are a good example of how far we are from AGI.

A good base test would be to give a manager a mixed team of remote workers, half being human and half being AI, and seeing if the manager or any of the coworkers would be able to tell the difference. We wouldn't be able to say that AI that passed that test would necessarily be AGI, since we would have to test it in other situations. But we could say that AI that couldn't pass that test wouldn't qualify, since it wouldn't be able to successfully accomplish some tasks that humans are able to.

But of course, current AI is nowhere near that level yet. We're left with benchmarks, because we all know how far away we are from actual AGI.

[criddell]

The AGI test I think makes sense is to put it in a robot body and let it navigate the world. Can I take the robot to my back yard and have it weed my vegetable garden? Can I show it how to fold my laundry? Can I take it to the grocery store and tell it "go pick up 4 yellow bananas and two avocados that will be ready to eat in the next day or two, and then meet me in dairy"? Can I ask it to dice an onion for me during meal prep?

These are all things my kids would do when they were pretty young.

[gonzobonzo]

I agree, I think of that as the next level beyond the digital assistant test - a physical assistant test. Once there are sufficiently capable robots, hook one up to the AI. Tell it to mow your lawn, drive your car to the mechanic and have the mechanic to get checked, box up an item, take it to the post office, and have it shiped, pick up your dry cleaning, buy ingredients from a grocery store, cook dinner, etc. Basic tasks an low-skilled worker would do as someone's assistant.

[bumby]

I think the next harder level in AGI testing would be “convince my kids to weed the garden and fold the laundry” :-)

[fragmede]

Convincing kids is AGI, convincing adults is ASI.

[godshatter]

The problem with "spot the difference" tests, imho, is that I would expect an AGI to be easily spotted. There's going to be a speed of calculation difference, at the very least. If nothing else, typing speed would be completely different unless the AGI is supposed to be deceptive. Who knows what it's personality would be like. I'd say it's a simple enough test just to see if an AGI could be hired as, for example, an entry level software developer and keep it's job based on the same criteria base-level humans have to meet.

I agree that current AI is nowhere near that level yet. If AI isn't even trying to extract meaning from the words it smiths or the pictures it diffuses then it's nothing more than a cute (albeit useful) parlor trick.

[gonzobonzo]

Those could probably be mitigated pretty easily in testing situations. For example, making sure all participants had a delay in chat conversations, or running correspondence through an LLM to equalize the personality.

However, I'm not sure an AGI test should be mitigating them. If an AI isn't able to communicate at human speeds, or isn't able to achieve the social understandings that a human does, it would probably be wrong to say that it has the same intelligence capabilities as a human (how AGI has traditionally been defined). It wouldn't be able to provide human level performance in many jobs.

[svantana]

Why even bother with the people in the mix? Just tell the AGI: make as much money as you can in 6 months. Preferably without breaking any laws.

[crazylogger]

I think next year's AI benchmarks are going to be like this project: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

Give the AI tools and let it do real stuff in the world:

"FounderBench": Ask the AI to build a successful business, whatever that business may be - the AI decides. Maybe try to get funded by YC - hiring a human presenter for Demo Day is allowed. They will be graded on profit / loss, and valuation.

Testing plain LLM on whiteboard-style question is meaningless now. Going forward, it will all be multi-agent systems with computer use, long-term memory & goals, and delegation.

[Miraltar]

This sounds like a terrible idea to me, you're training intelligent computer to aim for power. It's fine as long as they're bad but if they get good then we have a problem

[ben_w]

You're not alone in this; I expect us to have not yet enumerated all the things that we ourselves mean by "intelligence".

But conversely, not passing this test is a proof of not being as general as a human's intelligence.

[kypro]

I find the "what is intelligence?" discussion a little pointless if I'm honest. It's similar to asking a question like does it mean to be a "good person" and would we know whether an AI or person is really "good"?

While understanding why a person or AI is doing what it's doing can be important (perhaps specifically in safety contexts) at the end of the day all that's really going to matter to most people is the outcomes.

So if an AI can use what appears to be intelligence to solve general problems and can act in ways that are broadly good for society, whether or not it meets some philosophical definition of "intelligent" or "good" doesn't matter much – at least in most contexts.

That said, my own opinion on this is that the truth is likely in between. LLMs today seem extremely good at being glorified auto-completes, and I suspect most (95%+) of what they do is just recalling patterns in their weights. But unlike traditional auto-completes they do seem to have some ability to reason and solve truly novel problems. As it stands I'd argue that ability is fairly poor, but this might only represent 1-2% of what we use intelligence for.

If I were to guess why this is I suspect it's not that LLM architecture today is completely wrong, but that the way LLMs are trained means that in general knowledge recall is rewarded more than reasoning. This is similar to the trade-off we humans have with education – do you prioritise the acquisition of knowledge or critical thinking? Maybe believe critical thinking is more important and should be prioritised more, but I suspect for the vast majority of tasks we're interested in solving knowledge storage and recall is actually more important.

[ben_w]

That's certainly a valid way of looking at their abilities at any given task — "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".

But when the question is "are they going to more important to the economy than humans?", then they have to be good at basically everything a human can do, otherwise we just see a variant of Amdahl's law in action and the AI perform an arbitrary speed-up of n % of the economy while humans are needed for the remaining 100-n %.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the ARC prize is more about the latter.

[IanCal]

> are they going to more important to the economy than humans?", then they have to be good at basically everything a human can do,

I really don’t think that’s the case. A robot that can stack shelves faster than a human is more valuable at that job than someone who can move items and also appreciate comedy. One that can write software more reliably than person X is more valuable than them at that job even if X is well rounded and can do cryptic crosswords and play the guitar.

Also many tasks they can be worse but cheaper.

I do wonder how many tasks something like o3 or o3 pro can’t do as well as a median employee.

[ben_w]

> I really don’t think that’s the case. A robot that can stack shelves faster than a human is more valuable at that job than someone who can move items and also appreciate comedy.

Yes, until all the shelves are stacked and that is no longer your limiting factor.

> One that can write software more reliably than person X is more valuable than them at that job even if X is well rounded and can do cryptic crosswords and play the guitar.

Cryptic crosswords and guitar playing are already something computers can do, so they're not great examples.

Consider a different example: "computer" used to be a job title of a person who computes. A single Raspberry Pi model zero, given away for free on a magazine cover at launch, can do this faster than the entire human population combined even if we all worked at the speed of the world record holder 24/7. But that wasn't enough to replace all human labour.

[tedy1996]

AFAIK 55% of PRs written by latest GPT model get approved.

[NetRunnerSu]

Unfortunately, we did it. All that is left is to assemble the parts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44488126

[cttet]

The point is not that having a high score -> AGI, their ideas are more of having a low score -> we don't have AGI yet.

[kubb]

AGI isn't defined anywhere, so it can be anything you want.

[mindcrime]

Oh, it's defined in lots of places. The problem is.. it's defined in lots of places!

[FrustratedMonky]

Yes. And a lot of humans also don't pass for having AGI.

[avmich]

Roughly speaking, the job of a medical doctor is to diagnose the patient - and then, after the diagnosis is made, to apply the healing from the book, corresponding to the diagnosis.

The diagnosis is pattern matching (again, roughly). It kinda suggests that a lot of "intelligent" problems are focused on pattern matching, and (relatively straightforward) application of "previous experience". So, pattern matching can bring us a great deal towards AGI.

[AnimalMuppet]

Pattern matching is instinct. (Or at least, instinct is a kind of pattern matching. And once you learn the patterns, pattern matching can become almost instinctual). And that's fine, for things that fit the pattern. But a human-level intelligence can also deal with problems for which there is no pattern. (I mean, not always successfully - finding a correct solution to a novel problem is difficult. But it is within the capability of at least some humans.)

[whiplash451]

You're not the only one. ARC-AGI is a laudable effort, but its fundamental premise is indeed debatable:

"We argue that human cognition follows strictly the same pattern as human physical capabilities: both emerged as evolutionary solutions to specific problems in specific evironments" (from page 22 of On the Measure of Intelligence)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547

[Davidzheng]

But I believe that because of this "even edge" thing which people call of AI weakenesses being not necessarily same of humans, once we run out of these tests which AI is worse than humans it will actually in effect be very much superhuman. My main evidence for this is leela-zero the Go AI who struggled with ladders and some other aspects of Go play well into the superhuman regime (in go it's easier to see when it's superhuman bc you can have elos and play win-rates etc and there's less room for debates)

[jxjnskkzxxhx]

> I feel like I'm the only one who isn't convinced getting a high score on the ARC eval test means we have AGI

Francois explicitly says that's not how ARC is supposed to be interpreted.

[SubiculumCode]

[1]https://app.rescript.info/public/share/W_T7E1OC2Wj49ccqlIOOz...

Perhaps it's because the representations are fractured. The link above is to the transcript of an episode of Machine Learning Street Talk with Kenneth O. Stanleyabout The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis[1]

[cainxinth]

> It's mostly about pattern matching...

For all we know, human intelligence is just an emergent property of really good pattern matching.

[CamperBob2]

If you can write code to solve ARC by "overfitting," then give it a shot! There's prize money to be won, as long as your model does a good job on the hidden test set. Zuckerberg is said to be throwing around 8-figure signing bonuses for talent like that.

But then, I guess it wouldn't be "overfitting" after all, would it?

[andoando]

Who says intelligence is anything more than "pattern matching"? Everything is patterns

[tippytippytango]

He’s playing the game. You have to say AGI is your goal to get attention. It’s just like the YouTube thumbnail game. You can hate it, but you still have to play if you want people to pay attention.

[cess11]

Much like other forms of psychometry, especially related to so called intelligence, it's mainly about stratification and discrimination for ideological purposes.

[nxobject]

I understand Chollet is transparent that the "branding" of the ARC-AGI-n suites is meant to be suggestive of its purpose, than substantial.

However, it does rub me the wrong way - as someone who's cynical of how branding can enable breathless AI hype by bad journalism. A hypothetical comparison would be labelling SHRDLU's (1968) performance on Block World planning tasks as "ARC-AGI-(-1)".[0]

A less loaded name like (bad strawman option) "ARC-VeryToughSymbolicReasoning" should capture how the ARC-AGI-n suite is genuinely and intrinsically very hard for current AIs, and what progress satisfactory performance on the benchmark suite would represent. Which Chollet has done, and has grounded him throughout! [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

[heymijo]

I get what you're saying about perception being reality and that ARC-AGI suggests beating it means AGI has been achieved.

In practice when I have seen ARC brought up, it has more nuance than any of the other benchmarks.

Unlike, Humanity's Last Exam, which is the most egregious example I have seen in naming and when it is referenced in terms of an LLMs capability.

[maaaaattttt]

I've said this somewhere else, but we have the perfect test for AGI in the form of any open world game. Give the instructions to the AGI that it should finish the game and how to control it. Give the frames as input and wait. When I think of the latest Zelda games and especially how the Shrine chanllenges are desgined they especially feel like the perfect environement for an AGI test.

[Lerc]

And if someone makes a machine that does all that and another person says

"That's not really AGI because xyz"

What then? The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI.

In many respects I feel like all of the claims that models don't really understand or have internal representation or whatever tend to lean on nebulous or circular definitions of the properties in question. Trying to pin the arguments down usually end up with dualism and/or religion.

Doing what Chollet has done is infinitely better, if a person can easily do something and a model cannot then there is clearly something significant missing

It doesn't matter what the property is or what it is called. Such tests might even help us see what those properties are.

Anyone who wants to claim the fundamental inability of these models should be able to provide a task that it is clearly possible to tell when it has been succeeded, and to show that humans can do it (if that's the bar we are claiming can't be met). If they are right, then no future model should be able to solve that class of problems.

[maaaaattttt]

Given your premise (which I agree with) I think the issue in general comes from the lack of a good, broadly accepted definition of what AGI is. My initial comment originates from the fact that in my internal definition, an AGI would have a de facto understanding of the physics of "our world". Or better, could infer them by trial and error. But, indeed, it doesn't have to be the case. (The other advantage of the Zelda games is that they introduce new abilities that don't exist in our world, and for which most children -I've seen- understand the mechanisms and how they could be applied to solve a problem quite naturaly even they've never had that ability before).

[wat10000]

I'd say the issue is the lack of a good, broadly accepted definition of what I is. We all know "smart" when we see it, but actually defining it in a rigorous way is tough.

[ta8645]

This difficulty is interesting in and of itself.

When people catalogue the deficiencies in AI systems, they often (at least implicitly) forgive all of our own such limitations. When someone points to something that an AI system clearly doesn't understand, they say that proves it isn't AGI. But if you point at any random human, who fails at the very same task, you wouldn't say they lack "HGI", even if they're too personally limited to ever be taught the skill.

All of which, is to say, I don't think pointing at a limitation of an AI system, really proves it lacks AGI. It's a more slippery definition, than that.

[bonoboTP]

> It doesn't matter what the property is or what it is called. Such tests might even help us see what those properties are.

This is a very good point and somewhat novel to me in its explicitness.

There's no reason to think that we already have the concepts and terminology to point out the gaps between the current state and human-level intelligence and beyond. It's incredibly naive to think we have armchair-generated already those concepts by pure self-reflection and philosophizing. This is obvious in fields like physics. Experiments were necessary to even come up with the basic concepts of electromagnetism or relativity or quantum mechanics.

I think the reason is that pure philosophizing is still more prestigious than getting down in the weeds and dirt and doing limited-scope well-defined experiments on concrete things. So people feel smart by wielding poorly defined concepts like "understanding" or "reasoning" or "thinking", contrasting it with "mere pattern matching", a bit like the stalemate that philosophy as a field often hits, as opposed to the more pragmatic approach in the sciences, where empirical contact with reality allows more consensus and clarity without getting caught up in mere semantics.

[jcranmer]

> The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI.

The difficulty with intelligence is we don't even know what it is in the first place (in a psychology sense, we don't even have a reliable model of anything that corresponds to what humans point at and call intelligence; IQ and g are really poor substitutes).

Add into that Goodhart's Law (essentially, propose a test as a metric for something, and people will optimize for the test rather than what the test is trying to measure), and it's really no surprise that there's no test for AGI.

[loki_ikol]

Well for most, the next steps are probably towards removing the highly deterministic and discrete characteristics of current approaches (we certainly don't think in lock steps). Those have no measures. Even the creative aspect is undermined by those characteristics.

[sva_]

It is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.

[OtomotO]

You're not alone in this, no.

My definition of AGI is the one I was brought up with, not an ever moving goal post (to the "easier" side).

And no, I also don't buy that we are just stochastic parrots.

But whatever. I've seen many hypes and if I don't die and the world doesn't go to shit, I'll see a few more in the next couple of decades

[yunwal]

The author of the test agrees with you.

[mindcrime]

> I feel like I'm the only one who isn't convinced getting a high score on the ARC eval test means we have AGI.

Wait, what? Approximately nobody is claiming that "getting a high score on the ARC eval test means we have AGI". It's a useful eval for measuring progress along the way, but I don't think anybody considers it the final word.

[oldge]

Today’s llms are fancy autocomplete but lack test time self learning or persistent drive. By contrast, an AGI would require: – A goal-generation mechanism (G) that can propose objectives without external prompts – A utility function (U) and policy π(a│s) enabling action selection and hierarchy formation over extended horizons – Stateful memory (M) + feedback integration to evaluate outcomes, revise plans, and execute real-world interventions autonomously Without G, U, π, and M operating llms remain reactive statistical predictors, not human level intelligence.

[KoolKat23]

I'd say we're not far off.

Looking at the human side, it takes a while to actually learn something. If you've recently read something it remains in your "context window". You need to dream about it, to think about, to revisit and repeat until you actually learn it and "update your internal model". We need a mechanism for continuous weight updating.

Goal-generation is pretty much covered by your body constantly drip-feeding your brain various hormones "ongoing input prompts".

[onemoresoop]

> I'd say we're not far off.

How are we not far off? How can LLMs generate goals and based on what?

[FeepingCreature]

You just train it on the goal. Then it has that goal.

Alternately, you can train it on following a goal and then you have a system where you can specify a goal.

At sufficient scale, a model will already contain goal-following algorithms because those help predict the next token when the model is basetrained on goal-following entities, ie. humans. Goal-driven RL then brings those algorithms to prominence.

[kordlessagain]

Random goal use is showing to be more important than training. Although, last year someone trained on the fly during the competition, which is pretty awesome when you think about it.

[kelseyfrog]

How do you figure goal generation and supervised goal training are interchangeable?

[FeepingCreature]

Layman warning! But "at sufficient scale", like with learning-to-learn, I'd expect it to pick up largely meta-patterns along with (if not rather than) behavioral habits, especially if the goal is left open, because strategies generalize across goals and thus get reinforcement from every instance of goal pursuit during base training.

But also my intuition is that humans are "trained on goals" and then reverse-engineer an explicit goal structure using self-observation and prosaic reasoning. If it works for us, why not the LLMs?

edit: Example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11120 "Tell me about yourself: LLMs are aware of their learned behaviors". When you train a LLM on an exclusively implicit goal, the LLM explicitly realizes that it has been trained on this goal, indicating (IMO) that the implicit training hit explicit strategies.

[NetRunnerSu]

Minimize prediction errors.

[tsurba]

But are we close to doing that in real-time on any reasonably large model? I don’t think so.

[NetRunnerSu]

This is not about reasoning , this is about continuous learning and perpetual learning .

https://github.com/dmf-archive/PILF

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/beyond-snn-plausibl...

[NetRunnerSu]

Yes, you're right, that's what we're doing.

https://github.com/dmf-archive/PILF

[KoolKat23]

Very interesting, thanks for the link.

[asah]

we're closer than you think...

[NetRunnerSu]

In fact, there is no technical threshold anymore. As long as the theory is in place, you can see such AGI at most half a year. It will even be more energy efficient than the current dense models.

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/beyond-snn-plausibl...

[NetRunnerSu]

To pass Arc, you need a living model with sentient abilities, not the dead frog now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44488126