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Notes -
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:
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?
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?
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’ve never understood how the Turing test measured anything useful. The test doesn’t even require that the AI agent understand anything about its world or even the questions being asked of it. It just has to do well enough to convince a human that it can do so. That’s the entire point of the Chinese room rejoinder— an agent might well be clever enough to fool a person into thinking it understands just by giving reasonable no answers to questions posed.
The real test, to me, is more of a practical thing — can I drop the AI in a novel situation and expect it to figure out how to solve the problems. Can I take a bot trained entirely on being an English chatbot and expect it to learn Japanese just by interacting with Japanese users? Can I take a chatbot like that and expect it to learn to solve physics equations? That seems a much better test because intelligent agents are capable of learning new things.
Your tests have the exact same "problem" as the Turing Test, though. There's no way to tell if the bot actually "understands" Japanese just because it is able to produce Japanese words that are understandable to Japanese people after interacting with Japanese people a bunch. There's no way to tell if the bot actually "understands" physics just because it responds to an equation with symbols that a learned physicist would judge as "correct" after interacting with a bunch of physics textbooks or lectures or whatever. It could just be updating the mappings within its Chinese room.
One might say that updating the mappings in its Chinese room is essentially another way of describing "understanding." In which case the Turing Test also qualifies; if the chatbot is able to update its mappings during its conversation with you such that it appears to you as indistinguishable from a human, then that's equivalent to a bot updating its mappings through its conversations with Japanese people such that it appears to Japanese people as someone who understands Japanese.
I guess the point of my conjecture is that understanding is required for intelligence. And one way to get after intelligence is putting an agent in a situation where it has no previous experience or models to work from and expect it to solve problems.
Where I agree with the idea behind the Chinese Room is exactly that. Yes, the agent can answer questions about the things it’s supposed to be able to answer questions about well enough to fool an onlooker asking questions about the subject it’s been trained to answer. But if you took the same agent and got it off script in some way — if you stopped asking about the Chinese literature it was trained to answer questions about and started asking questions about Chinese politics or the weather or the Kansas City Chiefs, an agent with no agency that doesn’t actually have a mental model of what the characters it’s matching actually mean will be unable to adapt. It cannot answer the new questions because it specifically doesn’t understand any of tge old questions nor can it understand the new ones. And likewise if the questions in English are not understood it would be impossible to get the agent to understand Japanese because it’s unable to derive meanings from words, it’s just stringing them together in ways that it’s training tells it are pleasing to users.
It’s also a pretty good test for human understanding of a given subject. If I can get you to attempt to use the information you have in a novel situation and you can do so, you understand it. If you can only regurgitate things you have been told in exactly the ways you have been told to do it, you probably don’t.
Perhaps I'm not as familiar with the Chinese Room experiment as I thought I was. I thought the Chinese Room posited that the room contained mappings for literally every single thing that could be input in Chinese, such that there was literally nothing a Chinese person outside the room could state such that a response indicated a lack of understanding of Chinese? If the Chinese Room posits that the mappings contained in the room are limited, then that does change things, but then I also believe it's not such a useful thought experiment.
I personally don't think "understanding," at least the way we humans understand (heh) it, is a necessary component of intelligence. I'm comfortable with calling the software that underlies the behavior of imps in Doom as "enemy artificial intelligence," even though I'm pretty sure there's no "understanding" going on in my 486 Thinkpad laptop that's causing the blobs of brown pixels to move on the screen in a certain way based on what my player character is doing, for instance. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck and is otherwise completely indistinguishable from a duck in every way that I can measure, then I'll call it a duck.
Yeah, to tie this back to the above thread about the ramifications of massively-increased automation, what the hell does it matter if an AI really understands anything, if it puts most of us out of a job anyways? Philosophy is for those who don't have to grind for their bread.
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