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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.
As far as gorillas are concerned, humans still can't replace gorillas - neither a human nor any human technology can pass as a member of a gorilla tribe and fulfill all the functions that gorillas expect of each other no worse than a gorilla would. Yet, if gorillas could invent benchmarks as well as humans do, they probably would have made up a whole bunch that we would have blown past with ease - we could delouse more effectively, make devices that roar louder, thump artificial chests with more force, mass-produce silverback pheromones in bioreactors and obliterate any rivalling gorilla tribe with FPV drones. At some point, we have to recognise that "be a productive and well-assimilated member of the existing community of X" is a much harder problem than "outperform X at any given task not closely coupled with the former", which is unsurprising because life on earth has a much longer evolutionary history gatekeeping its respective community than it has doing anything that we consider useful.
Unfortunately, our informal AGI metrics, which really should be looking at performance at the latter, keep falling into the trap of measuring performance at the former instead, leaving us in a position somewhat akin to gorillas dismissing early hominids because they can't even grow a full back of majestic silver hair.
AI limitations go well beyond simply not fitting in as humans. Virtually anything we value in real life will be accomplished better by a below-average human than by an AI. AI agents, given scaffolding that allows them more human reasoning (long-term memory storage, frequent reminders of their objective, plugins that give them access to the internet etc.) are generally pretty useless and incapable of solving even very basic programs. And they usually go mad eventually.
Extending the gorilla-human analogy, AIs are really more like gorillas to us humans. We have much stronger tools available to do most of what they can do (construction equipment, machinery, etc.), and we can't exactly leave them alone to accomplish objectives--even if they could technically be better than humans at some forms of brute labor, for example, they won't understand the objective, or will forget it very quickly and pursue more gorilla things. We're not asking them to enter human society, just asking them to be useful to us on any level besides entertainment.
AIs are moderately more useful than that but still fundamentally extremely limited.
In fairness to AI, the internet drives many humans mad, too.>
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