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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.
a) We didn't.
b) it takes time to integrate new tech into business and to figure out how to best use it. Reasoner models are what, 3 months old now?
You'll be a little lucky if you're even alive. Pacific War 2: Electric Boogaloo and it's possible thermonuclear complications aside, there's many, many people who think like Ziz, there doesn't seem to be a good way of preventing jailbreaks reliably and making very deadly pathogens that kill in a delayed manner is not hard if you don't care about your own survival that much. And in any case, It looks like for a ~500k$ people will be able to run their own OS AGI in isolation, meaning moderately rich efilist lunatics could run their own shitty biolabs with help and spend as much time figuring out jailbreaks as needed, with no risk of snitching.
Possible, but also possible that you can just cheaply run massive automated genetic testing on trillions of particles, with billions of sensors located at every major human transit point that can pick up on those pathogens before their delayed death sentence kicks in and before they spread as widely as their proponents hope. It's all fiction for now, we'll see who wins (or perhaps not). I'm pretty optimistic humanity will survive beyond 2030.
There's no known disease that could wipe out all life on earth if every single person got it simultaneously. Prion disease is essentially the only 100% fatal disease and it does not kill quickly enough to stop reproduction.
A sufficiently powerful oncovirus probably wouldn't kill everyone, but are you really confident you'd be one of the 1-10% who wouldn't get a fatal cancer? I don't think we could even treat all those cancers even if we really geared up for it.
My own odds are pretty good, almost no one in my family ever had cancer and I barely get sick from normal viruses but playing viral russian roulette isn't on my to-do list.
I hope that we don't even have to play roulette with something mundane. COVID wasn't bad on a human historic scale and it was bad enough, plenty bad enough to justify shutting down GOF research in my view.
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