> ... these large language models are already intelligent enough to matter.

I'm definitely not contesting that.

I've always considered the idea of "AGI" to mean something of the holy grail of machine learning -- the point at which there is no real point in pursuing further advances in artificial intelligence because the AI itself will discover and apply such augmentations using its own capabilities.

I have seen no evidence that these transformer models would be able to do this, but if the current models can do so do then perhaps I will eat my words. (Doing this would likely mean that GPT-4 would need to propose, implement, and empirically test some fundamental architectural advancements in both multimodal and reinforcement learning.)

By the way, many researchers are equally convinced that these models are in fact not AGI -- that includes the head of OpenAI.