They had been saying it was 10 years away for ~50 years, so that's progress. Soon it will be 1 month away, for another two years. And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting.
Indeed. Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now.
And to describe the typical cycle completely, the final step is usually a few years after most people agree it's obvious it's already been here for a while yet no one can agree on which which year in the past it actually arrived.
why is that surprising? nobody really agrees on what the threshold for AGI is, and if you break it down:
is it artificial? yes.
is it general? yes. you can ask it questions across almost any domain.
is it intelligent? yes. like people say things like "my dog is intelligent" (rightly so). well is chatgpt more intelligent than a dog? yeah. hell it might give many undergrads a run for their money.
a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.
Sure, Gemini may spit out obviously self-contradictory answers 2% of the time. How does that compare to even the brightest humans? People slip up all the time.
Consider also all the smart people who get obsessed with conspiracy theories and spew out endless “mock reasoning” about them. Again, if “nothing incoherent anywhere” is your benchmark for intelligence, humans ain’t it. I mean, what would a computer say about a human that forgot where he just put his keys because he was thinking about dinner - “what, you can’t even store the last 10 seconds of history and search it?” Undergrads’ hit rates on mental double digit multiplication are probably <50%. In many, many ways we look completely idiotic. Surely intelligence is defined by what we can do.
Do you accept any positive definition for AGI, as in if they can achieve X result (write a bestselling novel, solve the Riemann Hypothesis) you would consider it intelligent? I find that negative definitions, as well as theoretical arguments about the techniques rather than the results (eg “LLMs cannot be AGI because they were trained the predict the next word”) to be basically useless for discussion compared to thresholds for positive results. The former will never be achieved (it is trivial to find cases of intelligent people being dumb) and the latter is totally subjective.
The other example I mentioned is something I've encountered a few times in my interactions with Gemini 2.5 pro, which was literally in the same response plainly claiming that this-or-that is possible and not possible. It's not a subtle logical fallacy and this is something even those conspiracy theorists wouldn't engage in. Meanwhile, I've started to encounter a brand-new failure mode: duplicating an explanation with minor rephrasings. I'm sure all of these will be issues will be ameliorated with time, but not actually fixed. It's basically fixes on top of fixes, patches on top of patches, but once in a while the whole Rube Goldberg nature of the fix will shine through. Just the way once in a while Tesla FSD will inexplicably decide to point the car towards the nearest tree.
Yes, humans have their own failure modes, but internal coherence is the effortless normal from which we sometimes deviate, whereas for machines, it's something to be simulated by more and more complex mechanisms, a horizon to strive towards but never to reach. That internal coherence is something that we share with all living beings and is the basis of what we call consciousness. It's not something that we'll ever be able to formalize though, but we will and should keep on trying to do so. Machine learning is a present day materialization of this eternal quest. At least this is how I see things; the future might prove me wrong, of course.
I'd be prepared to argue that most humans aren't guessing most of the time.
Research suggests otherwise[1]. Action seems largely based on intuition or other non-verbal processes in the brain with rationalization happening post-hoc.
I've figured for an age that this is because consciously reasoning through anything using language as a tool takes time. Whereas survival requires me to react to the attacking tiger immediately.
https://skepticink.com/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rational...
In fact, intuition is one of those things that a computer just can't do.
Cyborg c.elegans seem to behave just like the biological version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3zLpm_FbPg
Intuition is a guess based on experience. Sounds an awful lot to me like what LLMs are doing. They've even been shown to rationalize post-hoc just as Humans do.
Humans have incorrectly claimed to be exceptional from all of creation since forever. I don't expect we'll stop any time soon, as there's no consequence to suffer.
Almost everything we do is just an educated guess. The probability of it being correct is a function of our education (for whatever kind of education is applicable).
For example: I guess that when I get out of bed in the morning, my ankles will support my weight. They might not, but for most people, the answer is probably going to be their best guess.
It's easy to see this process in action among young children as another example. They're not born knowing that they won't fall over when they run, then they start assuming they can run safely, then they discovered skinned knees and hands.
The more you use that crap, the less intelligent you become.
Everyone else notices, even if it doesn't seem like it's happening to you because your machine keeps telling you you're making progress.
Honestly interested about your arguments here. While unprepared, i'd actually be guessing the opposite, saying that most people are guessing most of the time.
There are plenty of things I know that have nothing to do with guessing.
I understand the incentives to pretend these algorithms are even approaching humans in overall capability, but reducing human experience like this is embarrassing to watch.
Go do some hallucinogenics, meditate, explore the limits a tiny bit; then we can have an informed discussion.
Seems like you were very much guessing what i believe. And you were not right.
I don't agree with the people who think LLMs are close to human-level-anything. But i do believe, many smarter people like you, who i agree with in the most part, do underestimate how much of what we do and believe is the result of insane, yet still just, information processing & most of what brought us so far, is instinct. The brain is good at providing stories to make us feel in control. But given enough human experience and time, one will be surprised, what artificial systems can emulate. Not to mention how much of human behaviour is emulation itself.
is it clear? i don't know. until you can produce a falsifiable measure of understanding -- it's just vibes. so, you clearly lack understanding of my point which makes you not intelligent by your metric anyway ;-). i trust you're intelligent
When I tell an LLM to count to 10 with a 2 second pause between each count all it does is generate Python code with a sleep function. Why is that?
A 3 year old can understand that question and follow those instructions. An LLM doesn’t have an innate understanding of time it seems.
Can we really call it AGI if that’s the case?
That’s just one example.
Or disagreeing with your definition. AGI would need to be human-level across the board, not just chat bots. That includes robotics. Manipulating the real world is even more important for "human-level" intelligence than generating convincing and useful content. Also, there are still plenty of developers who don't think the LLMs are good enough to replace programmers yet. So not quite AGI. And the last 10% of solving a problem tends to be the hardest and takes the longest time.
ChatGPT would easily have passed any test in 1995 that programmers / philosophers would have set for AGI at that time. There was definitely no assumption that a computer would need to equal humans in manual dexterity tests to be considered intelligent.
We've basically redefined AGI in a human centric way so that we don't have to say ChatGPT is AGI.
The holodeck also existed as a well known science fiction example, and people did not consider the holodeck computer to be a good example of AGI despite how good it was at generating 3D worlds for the Star Trek crew.
Can it do stuff? Yes
Can it do stuff I need? Maybe
Does it always do the stuff I need? No
some intelligent humans fail at #2.
The output sometimes looks intelligent, but it can just as well be complete nonsense.
I don’t believe llms have much more potential for improvement either. Something else entirely is needed.
Wait, a true AGI will solve the nuclear fusion power in a couple of hours ..... we have chicken/egg problem here :D
Yeah, like Tesla Autopilot?
Wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years, people come to the conclusion that AGI needs quantum computing and come fusion to be feasible.