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".
That's a poor definition. Nowhere have I seen cheapness as being a requirement to count as AGI. If we have something that can do everything people can do and more, but it costs a lot means it's not AGI?
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If it's merely human equivalent but somehow costs a lot more than actual humans, then it's actually pretty marginal until the cost comes down. There are a lot of humans.
So you could technically have AGI without entering a true AGI era. "95% as good as an average Harvard graduate across the board, but it costs $5 million/year to run" is impressive and scientifically interesting, but not economically transformative.
But if it costs $50,000/year to run, then everything changes really fast. And not necessarily in a good way.
It's also a very lame definition. Intelligence - and humans - are more than just labor.
(You'll forgive me for conflating humanity and intelligence - we are homo spaiens, after all. Thinking man.)
I'm not _confused_ why these "AI" "Labs" are using that definition though. It's extremely clear they're trying to eliminate the need for the non-owner class. They're not selling LLMs (some companies are, but not these companies). These companies are selling the idea of labor without laborers to people who hate and fear laborers - and their utter dependence on them - more than anything else in their lives.
Really looking forward to the scam collapsing. Crypto wasn't very satisfying to me because too many of the victims were just idiots. This time, it's class warfare.
Author here, I drew on this from AI 2027. Yes, a very-expensive AGI, e.g. $1 million / day to simulate a smart human, would be a huge deal. But it would have meaningfully different effects than a cheap one.
Here's one definition AI 2027 used [1]: "Superhuman coder (SC): An AI system for which the company could run with 5% of their compute budget 30x as many agents as they have human research engineers..."
[1] https://ai-2027.com/research/timelines-forecast