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Comment by workingonit3 | Hacker News Reader

Ordinary people do these things all the time. There are new companies made every day, new books top the charts every week/month/year, same for music. People have decent conversations every day. Ordinary people sometimes do have to talk someone out of suicide.

Yes, average humans are not beating the stock market. But the average human is a bit better than you give credit to.

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Please consider the context of the question. An artificial intelligence only needs to have the cognitive abilities of a random average human in order to be "AGI".

The average human has never published a bestselling book. A person who has published a bestselling book is an above-average writer. And, therefore, an artificial intelligence capable of writing a bestselling book would be above an average human at the task of writing books. Therefore, somewhere beyond an AGI.

Attempting to redefine AGI to "being better than most humans at most tasks" is moving the goalposts towards artificial superintelligence.

Are you mistaking "average" for the literal average number of people? I am referring to average as in ability. Most authors are pretty average people, sure, the above average ones write war and peace etc. But most books these days are not from these extraordinary people.

Most authors do not write bestsellers.

This subthread was about the root list of claims being "more like ASI instead of AGI." By definition being superhuman means doing things no human can.

Indeed. And there is a wide gap between "being as cognitively capable as the average human" and "doing things that no human can", as you put it. So it is important to be realistic about what things the average human is capable of doing, and writing bestselling books is not one of them. Just as an example.

You're arguing for calling it AGI, but again, this tread was about calling it ASI.

And in order to describe the capabilities of what is AGI and ASI, it is useful to look at examples of what humans can do at a range of capabilities, with some nuance. It is not black and white.

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