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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:
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.
Most people will recognize AGI when it can independently enact change on the world, without regard for the desires or values of humans, including its creators. Until then, they'll see whatever brilliant things it enables as merely extensions of the guiding human's agency.
This.
MY personal benchmark is that I want an AI agent that can renew and refill a drug prescription for me.
This isn't a task that should require an AGI, but its one that is frustrating for me to accomplish, and often involves interacting with a couple websites, then making a phone call to multiple parties, possibly scanning and e-mailing a document or two, and finally confirming that the end result is ready for pickup.
This still seems beyond the current crop.
And I daresay that robotics is lagging enough that I'm skeptical that we'll see AI capable of physically navigating the real world independently, without using a human intermediary before we get AGI. They haven't yet hooked up an LLM to sensors that give it a constant stream of data about the real world that I know of, so maybe it can adapt faster than I expect. I wouldn't put anything out beyond 5 years.
That said, I don't think an AGI NEEDS to be able to navigate the world, if its smart enough it can use human intermediaries to achieve most of its goals, potentially including killing the humans.
So, if I'm being blunt and oversimplifying, the current state of AI tech is ABSOLUTELY a tool that can leverage human productivity, but needs more agentic behavior and the ability to manipulate atoms and not just bits, which I think most benchmarks don't actually account for.
This came out just this week: https://microsoft.github.io/Magma/
Things are moving very quickly now.
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