I have been hearing people say "[latest model] is AGI already, organizations just aren't leveraging it yet" all the way since GPT 4o. And people will probably continue making this claim every time a new frontier model comes out.
The thing they never seem to want to talk about is how the world already has several billion instances of non-artificial general intelligence. And, while they can collectively do quite a lot of different tasks, each one is only competent to do a vanishingly small percentage of all possible tasks. And that it usually takes quite a lot of work to get them to the point of being able to independently perform most of the interesting tasks. Because if we did talk about that then we'd have to start answering questions about why we expect artificial intelligence not to also be like that.
We like to emphasize the stupid part and use that as proof agi hasn't arrived because it's comforting. Don't want to look at it while it eats us alive.
For example, one of the stupid things we do is fail to realize that "intelligent" is a word with multiple senses. Which then makes a muddle of conversations like this because we all - myself included - tend to switch back and forth between senses of the term without even realizing we're doing it. So we have sense A of "intelligent", which means something like "capable of abstract reasoning". And we have sense B of "intelligent", which means something more like "the opposite of stupid". These two meanings don't actually have much to do with each other. But a lot of the hype around LLMs and the possibility of them being a form of AGI tends to hinge on tacitly assuming that an artificial system that can do abstract reasoning tasks won't do stupid things. Simply because sense A has one characteristic, sense B has the other, and we happen to use the same word to describe both.
But the definition I had in mind was the one in Wikipedia, "matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks." Well, if it's going to do that, it can't be stupider than capable humans nearly as often as it is.
It’s things like that that leave me convinced it’s not really AGI. The symbolic reasoning element doesn’t really seem to be there. And I’m not prepared to call something general intelligence if it can’t do that.
Also, maybe even more to the point, it can’t even learn. No, pre- and post-training are not the same thing.