[bananaflag]

I have no idea why this "AGI is not even well defined" meme gained so much traction recently.

AGI is something that can do everything better than humans. Write a novel, seduce someone, prove a theorem, fix a pipe, whatever. And it's clear right now we don't have it.

[NitpickLawyer]

Your definition is closer to ASI than AGI. And that's the explanation for your first sentence: it's not well defined because you ask 10 people and get 12 different definitions. And it gets even worse if you ask experts in the field :)

Then you have the process of drifting definitions (or, more colloquially moving the goalposts). Hassabis has said this himself: his definition of AGI has shifted. And we know that's true, because we have his definition from 2010 when he started DeepMind. His definition then was much much "simpler", and there are arguments to be made that we already have that. But, alas, he's changed the definition. As did most of us. Seeing the progress will do that to you.

Even going by your definition, even adjusting it for "General" instead of "Super", it's still not clear. What's better? Is a poem written by a nobel laureate better than one written by a lit student? Probably. Is one written by a nobel laureate better than another written by another nobel laureate? Maybe? Is the one scribbled on a card by your 5yo for your birthday better? It most certainly is better for you. And so on...

We're not dealing with easy to define things here. Hell, I could make arguments that every word in Artificial General Intelligence is so hard to define or ambiguous that you'd never reach a consensus between a group of people. There are good arguments to be made in ever each direction. That makes it by definition not well defined. It's all ... relative :)

[pell]

I don’t think the definition is that clear cut at all. A human can remember the smell of something and invoke it right then and there even if only for half a second. Are we expecting an AGI to do the same?

Then again, transformers seem super-human in some ways already. Who do you know who can more or less recite and make associations from (even if not always intelligently) hundreds of billions of text fragments? Transformers already are better at math than your average human.

My bet is we’ll land in a weird place in between where these systems clearly have some superhuman intelligent capabilities but still are far from “do everything better than humans”.

[somewhatgoated]

Is seducing someone a cognitive task? In a way I guess it is but often there are a lot of meatspace factors at play as well.

Maybe a bit off topic but your comment made me wonder.

I think generally we don’t have a good definition of what intelligence is.

[DonutATX]

Which humans? "Humans" are not fungible objects, no matter what the gray-wool-suit set says. The LLMs are already replacing human workers on the bottom of the food chain. Are they perfect? No. Are the humans they are replacing perfect? No. At that point it becomes about tradeoffs.

If AGI is "better at every human at everything" that is ASI, which is a different breed of cat.

[hidelooktropic]

You make a good point that not having it is easy to spot. But what precisely would flip the switch?

Seducing someone for example, how often would that have to work? On all people? Maybe that was just thrown out as an example but it points to how subjective these goal posts are.

[amanaplanacanal]

This problem was inherent even in the original turing test. Is it AI if it fools just one person? Or does it have to fool everybody?

[coldtea]

It has to fool the average person. Fooling someone with low IQ/bad perception is not really a feat.

[ddp26]

It's been a big problem for a while. The big Metaculus question about AGI has depends on the game "Montezuma's revenge" (!), and there have been many debates about this going back to at least 2020: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general...

[coldtea]

>AGI is something that can do everything better than humans. Write a novel, seduce someone, prove a theorem, fix a pipe, whatever

That was never the concept (which predates LLMs).

AGI was something that can think like a human.

Not necessarily better, and not necessarily do everything any human can do.

[andai]

Well, the 2nd one requires a human form (I think? Or at least video), and the 3rd one requires robotics.

By the 3rd example we won't have AGI until we have plumber-level robotics, and by the 2nd example we won't have AGI until the plumber is really hot.

[GaggiX]

Given your definition what's the difference between AGI and superintelligence?

AGI should at least match, not surpass humans in every cognitive task.

[coldtea]

AGI is just "artificial" (a program) version of general intelligence (the general purpose intelligence humans have).

Nothing in AGI implies "surpass humans in every cognitive task".

Not even "match in every cognitive task" is really required. There are humans that by definition have "general intelligence" that still don't match other humans "in every cognitive task", just in some.

Why should AGI need to match ALL humans in EVERY congitive task then? An AGI just needs to be as good as an average (or even slightly below average) human, in human-like cognition.

[worldsayshi]

I guess AGI is the breaking point and superintelligence is everything above?

[giancarlostoro]

It's not just that, it can also learn without having to be retrained. Which goes back to the issue, the real issue is people like Scam Altman can claim AGI is near, but then later say "well my view of AGI was that it is x, y and z" if not pressed to define what they think AGI is in that exact moment they're commenting on AGI, they can just later redefine it.