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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.
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.
The Turing test is an insanely strong test, in the sense that an AI that passes it can be seen to have achieved human-level intelligence at the very least. By this I mean the proper, adversarial test with a fully motivated and intelligent tester (and ideally, the same for the human participant).
Certainly no AI today could pass such a thing. The current large SotA models will simply tell you they are an AI model if you ask. They will outright deny being human or having emotions. I don't know how anyone could think these models ever passed a Turing test, unless the tester was a hopeless moron who didn't even try.
One could object that they might pass if people bothered to finetune them to do so. But that is a much weaker claim akin to "I could win that marathon if I ever bothered to get up from this couch." Certainly they haven't passed any such tests today. And I doubt any current AI could, even if they tried.
In fact, I expect we'll see true superhuman AGI long before such a test is consistently passed. We're much smarter than dogs, but that doesn't mean we can fully imitate them. Just like it takes a lot more compute to emulate a console such as the SNES than such devices originally had, I think it will require a lot of surplus intelligence to pretend to be human convincingly. If there is anything wrong with the Turing test, it's that it's way too hard.
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