alt Hacker News“AGI” never made sense to me. It’s a purely marketing term right?
I’ve ignored it thinking it would go away, but it keeps coming up.
I get that consciousness differs from intelligence and that our waking awareness of life is a complete mystery.
Knowledge and thus intelligence however I consider as actively being solved by these large ML models. That is, with the right combination of machinery and know-how, you’ll get it.
But you’d be no nearer to solving consciousness.
Given this thought trajectory - what is AGI supposed to be?
Replies
The OpenAI charter defines it as:
"highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work"
https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interv...
> Knowledge and thus intelligence
How can you conflate the two.
> solving consciousness
We are very much not interested in that. We just need a proper problem solver.
I like recursive self improvement instead. It seems like something that is actually quantifiable and kinda “the point” of why consciousness is important to humans.
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Not sure why you are bringing up consciousness, that’s largely orthogonal to intelligence. AGI is usually taken to mean the capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks, as opposed to being limited to certain kinds of tasks, or to not matching the general level of human intelligence in some respect.
Intelligence, and hence AGI, doesn’t require consciousness or emotions or sentience.