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Comment by khalic | Hacker News Reader

ok so first the industry takes the AI term, uses it with a very vague resemblance to what it used to mean, for marketing purpose, then they latch on to the AGI term to talk about what people used to consider AI. Now there is no sign of actual AGI happening any time soon, so we're going to reinterpret AGI to mean something diminutive like a chatbot?

Don't you see a problem here? Terms are used to describe the world and need a semblance of stability so we don't end up in a race to the bottom just so investors can feel good.

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> Now there is no sign of actual AGI happening any time soon

Do you genuinely hold this position, or do you not realize how far the goalposts have shifted?

In 2022, prominent AI critic Gary Marcus offered to bet $100,000 that we wouldn't have AGI by 2029. https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-fi... Because the definition of AGI is unclear, he defined that AGI would be achieved if an AI model could do THREE of the five following tasks:

- In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc.

- In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI.

- In 2029, AI will not be able to work as a competent cook in an arbitrary kitchen (extending Steve Wozniak’s cup of coffee benchmark).

- In 2029, AI will not be able to reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.]

- In 2029, AI will not be able to take arbitrary proofs from the mathematical literature written in natural language and convert them into a symbolic form suitable for symbolic verification.

Today's AI models can do FOUR of these five.

Using 2022 goalposts, we already have AGI. We blew past these goalposts months ago, and nobody noticed.

That’s his definition and in no way a universal one.

In the meantime, it’s still very easy to differentiate between an AI and a human in a chat. You just need to know the quirks of these systems. Like counting letters, hitting the safeguards, etc.

So call me when one of them can pass the Turing test against me and then we can talk about AGI

There is no accepted definition of intelligence that is usable for classification of intelligence across the sciences.

On top of that for your strong feelings, you don't have the conviction to write down a strong definition of intelligence yourself, which allows you to accelerate the goal posts up to light speed. The fun thing about writing out a formal definition is suddenly almost everything or almost nothing, including a lot of humans, has intelligence.

Not basing intelligence on your feelings of the moment makes it a hard thing to define across everything intelligence applies to.

> So call me when one of them can pass the Turing test against me and then we can talk about AGI

Ring ring I'm calling you right now. We blew past the Turing test goalpost over a year ago, using 2024 models.

https://www.ie.edu/uncover-ie/has-ai-passed-the-turing-test-...

GPT-4.5 passed the Turing Test with a 73% human rating, outscoring actual human subjects. That is, human evaluators considered the AI more human than an actual human, 73% of the time. LLaMa-3.1 was judged to be a human 56% of the time.

The 'strawberry' test was fixed years ago with the invention of CoT; models only fail that test today when thinking is disabled.

I'm not repeating myself

Sure, but it's clear your priors are very outdated.

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