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by 9rx 317 days ago
> no general program will be the best at all tasks.

Perhaps I wasn't entirely clear, but AGI isn't expected to be the best at all tasks. The bar is only as compared to a human, which also isn't the best at all tasks.

But you are right that nobody knows how to make them good at even some tasks. Hence why everyone is so concerned about LLMs writing code. After all, if you had "true" AGI, what would you need code for? It is well understood that AGI isn't going to happen. What many are banking on, however, is that AGI can be simulated if LLMs can pull off being good at one task (coding).

> They want to be the first for bragging rights, hype, VC funding, and control.

That's the motivation for trying to create AGI (at least pretending to), but not AGI itself.

1 comments

Fair enough. I respect the objective of making a better coding assistant, and I use LLMs for this purpose all the time. I think this is why I would give Anthropic a pass on more things than some of the others, since they are clearly interested in that application, while the others seemed almost begrudgingly pushed into it. If others focused on this application early on, the agentic approach probably would have progressed faster.

But I think we do the discipline a disservice by referring to coding assistance as AGI. Also, having them be good enough that they can write their own code autonomously is a nightmare scenario to me, but I know many others don't feel that way.