"Claude Code and Codex are essentially AGI at this point"
Okaaaaaaay....
Okaaaaaaay....
While a bit 'time-machiney' - I think if you took an LLM of today and showed it to someone 20 years ago, most people would probably say AGI has been achieved. If someone wrote a definition of AGI 20 years ago, we would probably have met that.
We have certainly blasted past some science-fiction examples of AI like Agnes from The Twilight Zone, which 20 years ago looked a bit silly, and now looks like a remarkable prediction of LLMs.
By todays definition of AGI we haven't met it yet, but eventually it comes down to 'I know it if I see it' - the problem with this definition is that it is polluted by what people have already seen.
No, as long as people can do work that a robot cannot do, we don't have AGI. That was always, if not the definition, at least implied by the definition.
I don't know why the meme of AGI being not well defined has had such success over the past few years.
Surely the 'General Intelligence' definition has to be consistent between 'Artificial General Intelligence' and 'Human General Intelligence', and humans can be generally intelligent even if they can't solve calculus equations or protein folding problems. My definition of general intelligence is much lower than most - I think a dog is probably generally intelligent, although obviously in a different way (dogs are obviously better at learning how to run and catch a ball, and worse at programming python).
It gets worse though. While one could claim that scoring equivalently on some benchmark indicates performance at the same level - and I'd likely agree - that's not what I take AGI to mean. Rather I take it to mean "equivalent to a human" so if it utterly fails at something we're good at such as driving a car through a construction zone during rush hour then I don't consider it to have met the bar of AGI even if it meets or exceeds us at other unrelated tasks. You have to be at least as general as a stock human to qualify as AGI in my books.
Now I may be but a single datapoint but I think there are a lot of people out there who feel similarly. You can see this a lot in popular culture with AGI (or often AI) being used to refer to autonomous humanoid robots portrayed as operating at or above a human level.
Related to all that, since you mention protein folding. I consider that to be a form of super intelligence as it is more or less inconceivable that an unaided human would ever be able to accomplish such a feat. So I consider alphafold to be both super intelligent and decidedly _not_ AGI. Make of that what you will.
Artificial General Intelligence says nothing about physical ability, but movies with the ‘intelligence’ part typically match it with equally futuristic biomechanics to make the movie more interesting. AGI = Skynet, Physical AI = Terminator. The latter will likely be the hardest part, not only because it requires the former first, but because you can’t just throw more watts at a stepper motor and get a ballet dancer.
That said, I’m confident that if I could throw zero noise and precise “human sensory” level sensor data at any of the top LLM models, and their output was equally coupled to a human arm with the same sensory feedback, that it would definitely outdo any current self-driving car implementation. The physical connection is the issue, and will be for a long time.
> LLM models, ... outdo any current self-driving car
How would an LLM handle computer vision? Are you implicitly including a second embedding model there? But I think that's still the wrong sort of vision data for precise control, at least in general.
How do you propose to handle the model hallucinating? What about losing its train of thought?
I was confusing in my previous message. Right now it would be terrible at driving a car, but I was saying that has more to do with the physical interface (camera, sensors, etc) than the ability of an LLM. The ‘intelligence’ part is better than the PyTorch image recognition attached to a servo they’re using now, how to attach that ‘intelligence’ to the physical world is the 50 year task. (To be clear: LLMs aren’t intelligent, smart, or any sense of the word and never will be. But they can sure replicate the effect better than current self-driving tech.)
There is certainly a lot road between current technology and driving a car through a construction zone during rush hour, particularly with the same amount of driving practice a human gets.
Personally I think there could be an AGI which couldn't drive a car, but has genuine sentience - an awareness of being alive, although not necessarily the exact human experience. Maybe this isn't AGI, which more implies problem-solving and thinking rather than sentience, but in my gut if we got something sentient but that couldn't drive a car, we would still be there if that makes sense?
Nonetheless, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where something that is genuinely human level can't adapt in the field to a novel task such as driving a car. That sort of broad adaptability is exactly what the "general" in AGI is attempting to capture (imo).
Very abstract, but I think it’s important to remember that human intelligence also has jagged edges.
I think it was supposed to be a more useful term than the earlier and more common "Strong AI". With regards to strong AI, there was a widely accepted definition - i.e. passing the Turing Test - and we are way past that point already: ( see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674 )
Also, I would go one step further and claim that to pass the Turing test an AI system should be indistinguishable from a human when judged by people trained in making such a distinction. I doubt that they used such people in the experiment.
I doubt that any AI system available today, or in the foreseeable future, can pass the test as I qualify it above.
It also makes me consider it an inadequate test to begin with, since all classes of humans including domain experts can be fooled and have been in the past. The Turing test has always said more about the human participants than the machine.
Most people who took a look at a carefully crafted demo. I.e. the CEOs who keep pouring money down this hole.
If you actually use it you'll realize it's a tool, and not a particularly dependable tool unless you want to code what amounts to the React tutorial.
We've just become accustomed to it now, and tend to focus more on the flaws than the progress.
The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity.
I think if you took an LLM of today and showed it to someone 20 years ago, most people would probably say AGI has been achieved.
Current AI is a transcript generator. It can do smart stuff but it has no goals, it just responds with text when you prompt it. It feels like magic, even compared to 4-5 years ago, but it doesn’t feel like what was classically understood as AI, certainly by the public.
Somewhere marketers changed AGI to mean “does predefined tasks with human level accuracy” or the like. This is more like the definition of a good function approximator (how appropriate) instead of what people think (or thought) about when considering intelligence.
That's probably not because of an inherent lack of capability, but because the companies that run AI products don't want to run autonomous intelligent systems like that
We can't measure goals, autonomy, or consciousness. We don't even have an objective measure of intelligence. Instead, since you probably look like me I think it's polite to assume you're conscious…that's about it. There’s literally no other measure. I mean, if I wanted to be a jerk, I could ask if you're conscious, but whether you say yes or no is proof enough that you are. If I'm curious about intelligence I can come up with a few dozen questions, out of a possible infinite number, and if you get those right I'll call you intelligent too. But if you get them wrong… well, I'll just give you a different set of questions; maybe accounting is more your thing than physics.
So, do you just respond with text when you’re promoted with input from your eyes or ears? You’ll instinctively say “No, I’m conscious and make my own decisions”, but that’s just a sequence of tokens with a high probability in response to that question.
Do you actually have goals, or did the system prompt of life tell you that in your culture, at this point in time, you should strive to achieve goals[] because that’s what gets positive feedback?
Maybe this will help you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
The hard nut to crack here is nobody has am empirical test for the subjective experience of consciousness. A machine which actually possesses it, and a machine which merely emulates it and answers questions as if it has that subjective experience cannot be distinguished using any empirical test. That includes people; it's simply a matter of common courtesy and pragmatism that we assume other people have comparable subjective conscious experiences (aka they aren't p-zombies.)
I have to strongly disagree with you here. This was absolutely not the case in a very large amount of science fiction media, particular in the 20th century. AIs / robots were often depicted of automatons with no self-agency, no goal setting of their own, who were usually capable of understanding and following complex orders issued in natural language (but which frequently misunderstood orders in ways humans find surprising, leading to a source of conflict.)
Almost all of Asimov's robots are like this, there are a handful of counter examples, but for the most part his robots are p-zombies that mis-follow orders.
Nonhsentient AI with no personal motivation also frequently comes up in situations where the machine is built to be an impartial judge, for instance in The Demolished Man, all criminal prosecutions need to persuade a computer which does nothing but evaluate evidence and issue judgments.
Non-sentient AIs also show up often in ship-board computers. Examples are Mother in Alien, and the Computer in at least most of Star Trek (I'm no Trekkie, so forgive me for missing counter examples and nuance, technology in that show does whatever the writers needed.)
Even the droids in Star Wars, do they ever really execute agency over their own lives? They have no apparent life goals or plans, they're along for the ride, appliances with superficial personalities.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, does Deep Thought actually have self-agency? I only recall it thinking hard about the questions posed to it, and giving nonsensical answers which miss the obvious intent of the question, causing more trouble than any of it was worth.
Ghost in the Shell; obviously has sentient AIs, but in that setting these are novel and surprising, most androids in that are presumed to be just machines with dumb programming and it's only the unexpected emergence of more complicated systems that prompt the philosophizing.
To understand how big this is, you have to look at the numbers:
The Naive Method: This is what most people learn in school. To multiply two 4x4 matrices, you need 64 multiplications.
The Human Record (1969): For over 50 years, the "gold standard" was Strassen’s algorithm, which used a clever trick to get it down to 49 multiplications.
The AI Discovery (2022): AlphaTensor beat the human record by finding a way to do it in just 47 steps.
The real "intelligence explosion" feedback loop happened even more recently with AlphaEvolve (2025). While the 2022 discovery only worked for specific "finite field" math (mostly used in cryptography), AlphaEvolve used Gemini to find a shortcut (48 steps) that works for the standard complex numbers AI actually uses for training.
Because matrix multiplication accounts for the vast majority of the work an AI does, Google used these AI-discovered shortcuts to optimize the kernels in Gemini itself.
It’s a literal cycle: the AI found a way to rewrite its own fundamental math to be more efficient, which then makes the next generation of AI faster and cheaper to build.
https://deepmind.google/blog/discovering-novel-algorithms-wi... https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1knem3r/i_dont...
Which means that humans are reduced to a sort of uselessness / helplessness, using tools they don't understand.
Overall, no one tells Uncle Bob that he doesn't deserve to fly home to Minnesota for Christmas because he didn't build the aircraft himself.
But we all think it.