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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve changed my mind on this and think we’re already at AGI, in a jagged way. Remember we used to talk about narrow AI, which was the chess systems that beat expert humans but could do nothing else. Now models can do a wide range of tasks in very useful ways. That’s the general in AGI.

Now it seems like this ill-defined term has various other meanings attached that are separate milestones:

1. Continuous learning 2. Human-like reasoning 3. Ability to adapt to new situations and modalities 4. Being smarter than the most smart humans

And probably many more.

It’d be nice if we could get some general consensus on terminology if we’re going to debate what has or could come.

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> we’re already at AGI

Honestly - software that can read any long document (possibly educational) and answer complex detailed questions about it should have been sufficient.

We hit that a while back and the goalposts have been sprinting ever since.

I am not sure if it is necessarily moving the goalposts. I think AGI is such a fuzzy concept that everybody has wildly different definitions/tests for it.

I think it's also mostly a useless discussion. Since LLMs use a vastly different substrate, different training methods, etc. than humans, the cognitive abilities are always going to be a large mismatch to those of humans. On the one hand, they have surpassed humans in many areas, with superhuman recall, exploration of several paths, etc. On the other hand, they miss a certain feel for direction, overview, purpose, and ordering. They can really double down going completely in the wrong direction. So I'd rather say that it is a different intelligence and therefore it makes more sense to evaluate them by capabilities.

I think the mismatching intelligence is actually quite exciting, because the outcome may as well be that LLMs and human intelligence are complementary. That is if we don't let LLMs atrophy our skills, which is unfortunately happening too much.

Make it be able to position and route a complex pcb. Extra points if it also can design the circuit, select the components and make the footprints out of their datasheets.

A bayesian filter in a quadrillion dimension does more that one that only has one dimension, but it is only more of the same.

Exactly. When did AGI mean "do something almost no humans can do"?

So humans wouldn't qualify for AGI either. Good to know.

Did anyone ever claim that Humans are "general intelligence"?

Individually we are specialized intelligence. As a society we are absolutely a General Intelligence though

As I see it, even if you disregard the job of a person, ot their hobbies, or whatever intellectual activity that only a subset of the population engages with, you are left with a machine that talks, moves, drives, reads, writes, lies convincingly enough, manages money, enjoys a movie and can explain the plot and find plotholes and racord mistakes, etc.

That's millions of light years ahead than any current AI that only looks up very fast the solution space for code, language or math.

Not to mention that humans can do all of that stuff while fueled only by a can of Mt Dew and a bag of cheezies.

> Did anyone ever claim that Humans are "general intelligence"?

Right. So you admit that what we're looking for now is super human. Not just human, but more than human.

That's those goalposts I was talking about.

A bit like calling a crane "superhuman strength"

I mean sure, but who cares? It's a machine.

The same way an excavator is not judged by human standards, neither should AI be. It's a machine

Yes, I would call a crane superhuman strength. I think that's exactly what it should be called.

Requiring the intelligence to be above human is a shifted goalpost. Full stop.

Anyone can do what I said with the minimum amount of training. Once you've done one or two pcbs it becomes rather menial except for some critical signal here and there.

LLM struggle with even the most simple PCBs, how can one say they are minimally intelligent in that case?

So you admit that most humans can't do it.

> Anyone can do what I said with the minimum amount of training.

I'll bet you ten bucks that is not in the least bit true.

EDIT: Heh - I just did a bit of research - apparently agents do a fine job with simple PCB boards - but we shouldn't expect them to replace experts. "Experts" being the key word. Exactly what I said.

https://hackaday.com/2026/09/05/can-ai-now-design-pcbs-that-...

Uh, why does that need a stronger term than just “AI”?

I don’t feel like the goal posts have moved at all. I think most of us have a pretty good and stable intuition of what AGI should be. Like, just a generally intelligent robot for instance? Nothing too fancy. Just use one of those robot dogs. Don’t have to be smarter than a dog either. But you should be able to put an artificial brain in it and have something that can act about as intelligently as a dog, in a stable way, over the course of 10 years.

Hell, to make the bar even easier: could make it a believable NPC dog in a game.

We’ve pushed AI as close to edge of AGI as I could imagine. It’s hard not to think we’ll find some algorithm that pushes us over the edge fairly soon. But until we actually get there, let’s not exaggerate.

I mean, when we do get an AI algorithm that can actually learn like a human/animal intelligence.. what would we call it if we’ve already used “AGI”? “Very General Artificial Intelligence”?

I’m almost more inclined to start using “ASI” first. Even if our LLMs are not general in the way I’m thinking of, they’re clearly superior to an average human on every aspect they’ve been trained on. They’re also much faster. We can probably soon say “if you can train an AI on something it will be better than any human”.

> I don’t feel like the goal posts have moved at all.

10 years ago the Turing test was sufficient.

> Now models can do a wide range of tasks in very useful ways. That’s the general in AGI.

Maybe AgI with a teensy g. There is more to intelligence than calculation or answering questions (often badly outside the realm of calculation) upon demand.

We developed AGI but then realized people actually want "omnipotent genie with infinite wishes and no monkey's paw gotchas" to qualify as AGI.

I think people really wish AGI required consciousness or unbounded self improvement.

My hope for this era, is that humanity accepts the reality that the human mind has limits. Limits of attention, memory, and persistence. Then we will stop blaming people for things beyond any reasonable capacity they could carry.

we're not in AGI until I can have robots that play live improvisational jazz in real time as well as humans with me (and possibly other humans). That is, it has to solve the "we didn't find a keyboard player /bassist for tonight" problem

(this is a very personalized definition of AGI)

I can’t do that, and I think I’m a very capable HI. Is that really the bar?

> That’s the general in AGI.

No. That's the mete multiple in AGI.

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