Seems "AGI" is on the same level as "art" or "love" in that everyone knows what we're talking about but no one can nail down unanimously what it is.
AGI is something that can do everything better than humans. Write a novel, seduce someone, prove a theorem, fix a pipe, whatever. And it's clear right now we don't have it.
Seducing someone for example, how often would that have to work? On all people? Maybe that was just thrown out as an example but it points to how subjective these goal posts are.
Maybe a bit off topic but your comment made me wonder.
I think generally we don’t have a good definition of what intelligence is.
By the 3rd example we won't have AGI until we have plumber-level robotics, and by the 2nd example we won't have AGI until the plumber is really hot.
AGI should at least match, not surpass humans in every cognitive task.
Nothing in AGI implies "surpass humans in every cognitive task".
Not even "match in every cognitive task" is really required. There are humans that by definition have "general intelligence" that still don't match other humans "in every cognitive task", just in some.
Why should AGI need to match ALL humans in EVERY congitive task then? An AGI just needs to be as good as an average (or even slightly below average) human, in human-like cognition.
If AGI is "better at every human at everything" that is ASI, which is a different breed of cat.
Then again, transformers seem super-human in some ways already. Who do you know who can more or less recite and make associations from (even if not always intelligently) hundreds of billions of text fragments? Transformers already are better at math than your average human.
My bet is we’ll land in a weird place in between where these systems clearly have some superhuman intelligent capabilities but still are far from “do everything better than humans”.
Then you have the process of drifting definitions (or, more colloquially moving the goalposts). Hassabis has said this himself: his definition of AGI has shifted. And we know that's true, because we have his definition from 2010 when he started DeepMind. His definition then was much much "simpler", and there are arguments to be made that we already have that. But, alas, he's changed the definition. As did most of us. Seeing the progress will do that to you.
Even going by your definition, even adjusting it for "General" instead of "Super", it's still not clear. What's better? Is a poem written by a nobel laureate better than one written by a lit student? Probably. Is one written by a nobel laureate better than another written by another nobel laureate? Maybe? Is the one scribbled on a card by your 5yo for your birthday better? It most certainly is better for you. And so on...
We're not dealing with easy to define things here. Hell, I could make arguments that every word in Artificial General Intelligence is so hard to define or ambiguous that you'd never reach a consensus between a group of people. There are good arguments to be made in ever each direction. That makes it by definition not well defined. It's all ... relative :)
That was never the concept (which predates LLMs).
AGI was something that can think like a human.
Not necessarily better, and not necessarily do everything any human can do.
If the issue you care about is jobs going away then I think you'll find a growing movement with a common base of beliefs.
Although, for the most part, what we actually seem to care about is that the job gets done. It's just that all the training data we have is "guy shaped" (linear), not transformer shaped. We haven't actually figured out how to train a transformer yet.