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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Zeno's AGI.

For a long time, people considered the Turing Test the gold standard for AI. Later, better benchmarks were developed, but for most laypeople with a passing familiarity with AI, the Turing Test meant something. And so it was a surprise that when LLMs flew past the Turing Test in 2022 or 2023, there weren't trumpets and parades. It just sort of happened, and people moved on.

I wonder if the same will happen with AGI. To quote hype-man Sam Altman:

trying Grok 3 has been much more of a "feel the AGI" moment among high-taste testers than i expected!

Okay, actually he said that about Chat GPT 4.5, but you get the point. The last 6 months have seen monumental improvements in LLMs, with DeepSeek making them much more efficient and xAI proving that the scaling hypothesis still has room to run.

Given time, AI has been reliably able to beat any benchmarks that we throw at it (remember the Winograd schema?). I think if, 10 years ago, if someone said that AI could solve PHD level math problems, we'd say AGI had already arrived. But it hasn't. So what ungameable benchmarks remain?

  1. AGI should lead to massive increases in GDP. We haven't seen productivity even budge upwards despite dumping trillions into AI. Will this change? When?

  2. AI discoveries with minimal human intervention. If a genius-level human had the breadth of knowledge that LLMs do, they would no doubt make all sorts of novel connections. To date, no AI has done so.

What stands in the way?

It seems like context windows might be the answer. For example, what if we wanted to make novel discoveries by prompting an AI. We might prompt a chain-of-reasoning AI to try to draw connections between disparate fields and then stop when it finds something novel. But with current technology, it would fill up the context window almost immediately and then start to go off the rails.

We stand at a moment in history where AI advances at a remarkable pace and yet is only marginally useful, basically just a better Google/Stack Overflow. It is as smart as a genius-level human, far more knowledgable, and yet also remarkably stupid in unpredictable ways.

Are we just one more advance away from AGI? It's starting to feel like it. But I also wouldn't be surprised if life in 2030 is much the same as it is in 2025.

I agree with your main premise, but a nitpick:

For a long time, people considered the Turing Test the gold standard for AI. Later, better benchmarks were developed, but for most laypeople with a passing familiarity with AI, the Turing Test meant something.

I'm not really sure that's true. The Turing Test has been passed in some form or another since 1966, with ELIZA, and I also remember various chat bots on AOL instant messenger doing the same back in the early 2000s. I think that people realized quickly that the Turing test is just a novelty, something thought up by Turing in the early days of computer science that seemed relevant but was quickly proven not to be, and that various technologies could beat it.

ELIZA didn't pass the Turing Test. The Turing Test includes an adversarial element where a person is told that one player is human, and the other a machine, and must determine the difference.

It is not simply temporarily making a person think he is talking to a human when he already assumes that is the case.

It was not possible for computers to fool a median-IQ person in this manner until roughly 2022, give or take.

I don't think it's conclusive that nothing has passed the test before, because I don't think the test is necessarily set in stone. There are variations, and I think it's been romanticized enough that people have moved the goalposts for the test as we progress. I mean some people could be fooled while others are not. Eugene Goostman is another one from 2014 that is said to have passed the test.

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