alt Hacker News> The overlapping AGI definition I use here is "Most purely cognitive labor is automatable at better quality, speed, and cost than humans". For some of these researchers, saying they use this definitions is a bit of a stretch, but I included everyone who I judged as close enough to be informative.
Seems "AGI" is on the same level as "art" or "love" in that everyone knows what we're talking about but no one can nail down unanimously what it is.
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So find the group that cares about the collection of capabilities you care to talk about. Regardless of whatever line is drawn for AGI, it's obvious that should some tech advances come to pass, we'll all care about the threshold of many jobs going away. Does that mean AGI? The people who care about jobs won't quibble, they care about the jobs.
If the issue you care about is jobs going away then I think you'll find a growing movement with a common base of beliefs.
AGI is simple: the model does not need to be endlessly trained, I can hand it a PDF about a brand new programming language, and the next person to talk to the same model should get an answer at the same speed and knowledge as if it were trained. We are clearly nowhere near this, we're in a state where we can 100% fake this, but nobody has shown this to be the case yet. I think its certainly possible, but I am also convinced that it will require rethinking how we do LLMs today.
So it's not a human intelligence. The transformer works very differently. We're trying to emulate human intelligence on a very different architecture.
Although, for the most part, what we actually seem to care about is that the job gets done. It's just that all the training data we have is "guy shaped" (linear), not transformer shaped. We haven't actually figured out how to train a transformer yet.
I really liked Dario's metaphor that in the 80's, we could have said someday we'll have "supercomputers", which can do all the calculations we did except WAY faster. When, in reality, the AI's just get smarter over time, even if the frontier is jagged. AGI is just vibes only for "smart enough, consistently enough".
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.