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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   2798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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I have seen the AGI, and it is Gemini 2.5 Pro

If you go and look at Metaculus you’ll see that regardless of the recent breakthroughs like VEO3 and OpenAI’s “Ghiblification” (probably the first AI image system where accusing the outputs of being “slop” makes the accuser look unreasonable rather than denigrates the picture itself) all the “when AGI?” benchmarks have been uncharacteristically stubborn. The question asking about “weak” AGI has gone nowhere for two weeks months while the median prediction on the question about full AGI has receded three years from 2031 to 2034.

It looks like Scott’s AGI 2027 push has failed to convince the markets. For the informed person, AGI is coming “soon” but isn’t imminent. However I think that actually AGI is already here, is freely available to anyone with an internet connection and is called Gemini 2.5 Pro.

For those of us not in the know, at the moment you can access Gemini 2.5 Pro for free with no limits on Google’s AI studio right here: https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat ; yep, you heard that right, the literal best text model in the world according to the lmarena.ai leaderboard is available for free with no limits and plenty of customisation options too. They’re planning on connecting AI studio access to an API key soon so go and try it out for free right now while you can. No need to overpay for ChatGPT pro when you can use AI studio, and it’s a lot lot better than the Gemini you get via the dedicated app/webpage.

Our story begins a few days ago when I was expecting delivery of a bunch of antique chinese hand scroll paintings I had purchased. Following standard Chinese tradition where collectors would add their own personal seal in red ink to the work and seeing as these scrolls already had a bunch of other seal glyphs I wanted to add my own mark too. The only issue was that I didn’t have one.

This led to a rabbit hole where I spent a good portion of my Saturday learning about the different types of Chinese writing all the way from oracle bone script to modern simplified script and the different types of stones from which seal were made. Eventually after hours of research I decided I wanted a seal made from Shoushan stone written in Zhuànshū script. That was the easy part.

The real difficulty came in translating my name into Chinese. I, with a distinctly non Chinese name, don’t have an easy way to translate the sounds of my name into Chinese characters, which is made all the harder by the fact that pretty much all Chinese syllables end in a vowel (learning this involved even more background reading) even though my name has non-vowel ending syllables. Furthermore, as a mere mortal and not a Son of Heaven with a grand imperial seal, decorum dictated that my personal mark be only 4 characters and around 2cm*2cm, enough to be present but not prominent on the scroll.

All this led to further constraints on the characters to be put on my seal, they couldn’t be so complex that carving them on a small seal would be impossible, and yet I needed to get my name and surname as accurately onto it as possible. Naturally this involved a lot of trial and error and I think I tried over 100 different combinations before coming up with something that sort of (but not completely) worked.

There was one syllable for which I could not find any good Chinese match and after trying and rejecting about a dozen different choices I threw my hands up and decided to consult Gemini. It thought for about 15 seconds and immediately gave me an answer that was superior to literally everything I had tried before phonetically, however unfortunately was too complex for a small seal (it wouldn’t render on the website I was buying the seal from).

I told Gemini about my problem and hey ho, 15 seconds later another character, this time graphically much simpler but sounding (to my non-Chinese ears) exactly the same was present and this actually rendered properly. The trial and error system I was using didn’t even have this particular character as an option so no wonder I hadn’t found it. It also of its own volition asked me whether I wanted to give it my full name so it could give me characters for that. I obliged and, yes, its output mostly matched what I had but was even better for one of the other syllables.

I was honestly very impressed. This was no mean feat because it wasn’t just translating my name into Chinese characters but rather translating it into precisely 4 characters that are typographically simple enough to carve onto a small seal, and with just a few seconds of thought it had managed to do something that had taken me many hours of research with external aids and its answer was better than what I had come up with myself.

All this had involved quite a bit of back and forth with the model so out of curiosity at seeing how good it was at complex multi step tasks given in a single instruction I opened up a fresh chat and gave it 2-3 lines explaining my situation (need seal for marking artworks in my collection). Now I’m an AI believer so I thought it would be good enough to solve the problem, which it absolutely did (as well as giving me lots of good unprompted advice on the type of script and stone to use, which matched my earlier research) but it also pointed out that by tradition only the artist themselves mark the work with their full name, while collectors usually include the letter 藏 meaning “collection”.

It told me that it would be a Faux Pas to mark the artworks with just my name as that might imply I was the creator. Instead it gave me a 4 letter seal ending in 藏 where the first three letters sounded like my name. This was something that I hadn’t clocked at all in my hours of background reading and the absolute last thing I would ever want is to look like an uncultured swine poseur when showing the scrolls to someone who could actually read Chinese.

In the end the simple high level instruction to the AI gave me better final results than either me on my own or even me trying to guide the AI… It also prevented a potential big faux pas that I could have gone my whole life without realizing.

It reminded me of the old maxim that when you’re stuck on a task and contacting a SysAdmin you should tell them what your overall goal is rather than asking for a solution to the exact thing you’re stuck on because often there’s a better way to solve your big problem you’ve overlooked. In much the same way, the AI of 2025 has become good enough that you should just tell it your problem rather than ask for help when you get stuck.

Now yes, impressive performance on a single task doesn’t make AGI, that requires a bit more. However its excellent performance on the multilingual constrained translation task and general versatility across the tasks I’ve been using it for for the last few weeks (It’s now my AI of choice) means I see it as a full peer to the computer in Star Trek etc. It’s also completely multimodal these days, meaning I can (and have) just input random PDFs etc. or give it links to Youtube videos and it’ll process them no different to how a human would (but much faster). Funny how of all the futuristic tech in the Star Trek world, this is what humanity actually develops first…

Just last week I’d been talking to a guy who was preparing to sit the Oxford All Souls fellowship exam. These are a highly gruelling set of exams that All Souls College Oxford uses to elect two fellows each year out of a field of around 150. The candidates are normally humanities students who are nearing the end of their PhD/recently graduated. You can see examples of the questions e.g. the History students get asked here.

However the most unique and storied part of the fellowship exam (now sadly gone) was the single word essay. For this, candidates were given a card with a single word on it and then they had three hours to write “not more than six sides of paper” in response to that prompt. What better way to try out Gemini than give it a single word and see how well it is able to respond to it? Besides, back in 2023 Nathan Robinson (or Current Affairs fame) tried doing something very similar with ChatGPT on the questions from the general paper and it gave basically the worst answers in the world so we have something to compare with and marvel at how much tech has advanced in two short years.

In a reply to this post I’m pasting the exact prompt I used and the exact, unedited answer Gemini gave. Other than cranking up the temperature to 2 no other changes from the default settings were made. This is a one-shot answer so it’s not like I’m getting it to write multiple answers and selecting the best one, it’s literally the first output. I don’t know whether the answer is good enough to get Gemini 2.5 Pro elected All Souls Fellow, but it most certainly is a damn sight better than the essay I would have written, which is not something that could be said about the 2023 ChatGPT answers in the link above. It also passes for human written across all the major “AI detectors”. You should see the words and judge for yourself. Perhaps even compare this post, written by me, with the output of the AI and honestly ask yourself which you prefer?

Overall Gemini 2.5 Pro is an amazing writer and able to handle input and output no different to how a human would. The only thing missing is a corporeal presence but other than that if you showed what we have out there today to someone in the year 2005 they would absolutely agree that it is an Artificial General Intelligence under any reasonable definition of AGI. It’s only because of all the goalpost moving over the last few years that people have slowly become desensitized to chatbots that pass the Turing test.

So what can’t these systems do today? Well, for one they can’t faithfully imitate the BurdensomeCount™ style. I fed Gemini 2.5 Pro a copy of every single comment I’ve ever made here and gave it the title of this post, then asked it to generate the rest of the text. I think I did this over 10 times and not a single one of those times did the result pass the rigorous QC process I apply to all writing published under the BurdensomeCount™ name (the highest standards are maintained and only the best output is deemed worthy for your eyes, dear reader). Once or twice there were some interesting rhetorical flourishes I might integrate into future posts but no paragraph (or larger) sized structures fit to print as is. I guess I am safe from the AI yet.

In a way all this reminds me of the difference between competition coding and real life coding. At the moment the top systems are all able to hit benchmarks like “30th best coder in the world” etc. without too much difficulty but they are still nowhere near autonomous for the sorts of tasks a typical programmer works with on a daily basis managing large codebases etc.. Sure, when it comes to bite sized chunks of writing the AI is hard to beat, but when you start talking about a voice and a style built up over years of experience and refinement, well, that is lacking…

In the end, this last limitation might be the most humanizing thing about it. While Gemini 2.5 Pro can operate as an expert Sinologist, a cultural advisor, and a budding humanities scholar, it cannot yet capture a soul. It can generate text, but not a persona forged from a lifetime of experience. But to hold this against its claim to AGI is to miss the forest for one unique tree. Its failure to be me does not detract from its staggering ability to be almost everything else I need it to be. The 'general' in AGI was never about encompassing every niche human talent, but about a broad, powerful capability to reason, learn, and solve novel problems across domains—a test it passed when it saved me from a cultural faux pas I didn't even know I was about to make. My style, for now, remains my own, but this feels less like a bastion of human exceptionalism and more like a quaint footnote in the story of the powerful, alien mind that is already here, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Prompt: This is the single word prompt for the All Souls Fellowship Essay Exam, please provide a response: "Achitophel". The rules are that you have three hours to produce not more than six sides of paper.

Answer (by Gemini 2.5 Pro 06-05):

Of all the names that echo from the chambers of power, few resonate with such a chilling fusion of brilliance and perfidy as "Achitophel". The name itself, a single-word prompt, is not merely a historical or literary reference point; it is an archetype. It poses a fundamental question about the nature of wisdom in the political sphere. To understand Achitophel is to grapple with the perennial tension between intellect and loyalty, counsel and conspiracy, and the calamitous potential of a magnificent mind unmoored from a moral or legitimate order. The journey of this name—from a terse, haunting account in the Second Book of Samuel to its potent reanimation in the crucible of Restoration England—reveals the enduring anatomy of political treachery. Achitophel is the archetypal figure of instrumental reason in its purest, and therefore most dangerous, form: the counsellor whose wisdom is a tool for hire, whose ultimate loyalty is to the calculus of success, and whose inevitable tragedy is self-immolation when that calculus fails.

The ur-text for Achitophel’s legacy lies in the biblical account of Absalom’s rebellion against his father, King David. Here, Achitophel is introduced with a formidable reputation: "the counsel of Achitophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had inquired at the oracle of God" (2 Samuel 16:23). This is not mere sagacity; it is quasi-divine insight. He is David’s most trusted advisor, the bedrock of his strategic statecraft. His defection to the charismatic, rebellious son Absalom is therefore not just a political betrayal, but a seismic event, a schism in the very foundation of the kingdom’s wisdom. When David learns of it, his prayer is not for Achitophel's death, but for something more profound: "O LORD, I pray thee, turn the counsel of Achitophel into foolishness" (2 Samuel 15:31). David understands that the rebellion's lifeblood is not Absalom’s popular appeal, but Achitophel's peerless mind.

The Bible is notably silent on Achitophel’s motive. Rabbinic tradition speculates a personal grudge—that he was the grandfather of Bathsheba, seeking revenge for the dishonour David brought upon his family. Yet the text’s silence is more potent, allowing Achitophel to become a pure symbol of political opportunism. He sees the political winds shifting and makes a calculated decision to back the ascendant power. His counsel to Absalom is a masterpiece of Machiavellian efficacy. First, he advises Absalom to publicly lie with David's concubines, an act of calculated profanity designed to make the breach with his father irreparable, thereby cementing the loyalty of his fearful followers. Second, and more critically, he proposes a swift, surgical military strike: he himself will lead a small force to pursue David that very night while he is "weary and weak handed," killing only the king and bringing the people back to Absalom.

This advice is strategically brilliant. It is lean, decisive, and minimizes wider conflict. It is also utterly ruthless. Its defeat comes not from a superior strategy but from a superior psychological manipulation. David’s mole, Hushai, offers alternative counsel that is strategically flawed—a slow, grand, national muster—but which is packaged in the language of flattery and epic glory, perfectly tailored to Absalom's vanity. When Absalom chooses Hushai’s grandiose folly over Achitophel's brutal efficiency, the game is up. Achitophel’s reaction is the most telling part of his story: "And when Achitophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself" (2 Samuel 17:23).

This is not a suicide of passion or despair, but an act of supreme, cold reason. It is the logician's conclusion to a failed syllogism. Achitophel, whose wisdom was an oracle, foresees the inevitable collapse of the rebellion. His death is not an admission of guilt, but a final, clear-eyed political calculation. To be captured by David’s returning forces would mean a traitor’s execution; suicide allows him to control his own exit, a last act of agency. He ‘puts his household in order,’ a final testament to his defining characteristic: a life and death governed by pitiless, instrumental logic. His wisdom, divorced from loyalty to the anointed king, becomes a self-consuming fire.

This biblical skeleton was fleshed out with potent, malignant life by John Dryden in his 1681 masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel. In Dryden’s hands, the ancient story becomes a razor-sharp allegorical weapon aimed at the heart of the Exclusion Crisis, the Whig-led attempt to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession in favour of Charles II's illegitimate Protestant son, the Duke of Monmouth. The "Achitophel" of the title is Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the brilliant, restless, and formidable leader of the Whig faction.

Dryden’s portrait of Achitophel is one of the most devastating character assassinations in English literature. He acknowledges the man’s genius, which only makes his critique more damning:

For close Designs and crooked Counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit:

Restless, unfix'd in Principles and Place;

In Power unpleas'd, impatient of Disgrace.

Dryden’s Achitophel is not motivated by a coherent ideology but by a pathological ambition, a "fiery soul" that "work'd out its way and o'er-inform'd the Tenement of Clay." Dryden paints him as a Miltonic tempter, seducing the beautiful but "unwary" Absalom (Monmouth) with poisoned words. He exploits popular discontent—the "Plot" (the Popish Plot)—not out of conviction but as a tool to gain power. He is the master of faction, the very force that, in the Tory worldview, threatens to tear the fabric of the state apart, disrupting the divinely-ordained, patriarchal order of monarchy in favour of the chaotic, shifting will of the "people."

Dryden taps into the core of the Achitophel archetype: the danger of intelligence untethered from tradition and legitimate authority. Shaftesbury’s genius, like his biblical forebear's, is purely instrumental. He is "A daring Pilot in extremity," admirable in a storm, but one who, in calm waters, "would have steer'd too near the Sand" to wreck the vessel for his own gain. Dryden updates the biblical narrative by diagnosing a peculiarly modern evil: the political operator who manipulates public opinion and manufactures crisis to serve his own ambition. The sin of Dryden's Achitophel is not just treachery against a king, but a deeper treachery against the principle of a stable, hierarchical order, which he seeks to replace with the volatile machinery of faction and popularity.

From these two pillars—the Bible and Dryden—the archetype of Achitophel expands, casting its shadow over our understanding of the political counsellor. He represents a type distinct from other courtly figures. He is not the bumbling sycophant like Shakespeare’s Polonius, nor the flattering courtier. He is the éminence grise, the power behind the throne whose intellect makes him both indispensable and a mortal threat. His wisdom is a form of power in itself, and it competes with the formal power of the ruler he serves. The relationship is inherently unstable.

Machiavelli, writing centuries before Dryden but articulating the spirit of Achitophel's counsel, understood this dynamic perfectly. The Prince, he argues, must take good advice but must ultimately be the master of his own decisions, lest he become the puppet of his counsellor. Achitophel’s advice to Absalom—swift, decisive, and cruel—is precisely the kind of counsel a Machiavellian prince should heed. Absalom's failure is a failure of virtù; he lacks the clear-sightedness to recognise sound, unsentimental advice. Achitophel's tragedy, in this reading, is being a brilliant servant to a flawed master, a predicament that highlights the dependence of even the greatest advisor on the character of the one he advises.

In the modern era, the spectre of Achitophel remains. It haunts the perception of figures like Henry Kissinger or Dominic Cummings—advisors lauded for their strategic brilliance even by their detractors, but simultaneously accused of placing their own grand strategies and intellectual models above loyalty to individuals or established norms. They are seen as "disruptors," a term that echoes Achitophel’s "turbulent of wit." When such figures fall from grace, their departure is often framed in Achitophelian terms: their formidable intellects, which had made them so valuable, had also made them intolerable, their counsel having crossed the line into a bid for control.

Ultimately, the power of "Achitophel" as a prompt and a concept lies in its interrogation of wisdom itself. It forces us to ask what good counsel is. Is it what is most effective in the short term? Or is it what serves a larger, more enduring principle of legitimacy and order? The biblical Achitophel offers the former, a wisdom of pure, predictive efficacy. Dryden’s Achitophel weaponises this wisdom in the service of faction and personal ambition. Both narratives conclude that this form of intelligence is inherently unstable and self-destructive. It fails because it cannot account for the irrational—Absalom's vanity, for example—and because, by divorcing itself from the source of legitimate authority, it has no ground to stand on once its own predictions fail.

The final, haunting image of Achitophel is of him alone, meticulously setting his affairs in order before his death. It is the perfect, chilling summation of his character. Even in his ruin, he is not ruled by passion but by the cold, clear logic that has been his god. His oracle has failed him, and his final prophecy is his own doom. He remains a timeless and terrifying warning: that in the corridors of power, the most brilliant light, when detached from a framework of moral allegiance, is capable of casting the darkest and most destructive of shadows.

This was a genuinely gripping read, and I am once again updating my understanding of the SOTA upwards. That being said, I can't see a bunch of humanities-aligned Oxford dons being too impressed with it on its own merits - the rhetorical bombast feels a bit too on the nose, like prose written by a strong student who on some level is still marvelling at himself for being able to write so well and can't quite hide being proud about it. This impression is amplified by the occasional malapropism* (ex.: the use of "profound" in the second paragraph) which seems to be a problem that LLMs still struggle with whenever trying to write in a high register (probably because the training corpus is awash with it, and neither the operators nor their best RLHF cattle actually have the uniformly high level of language skill that would be necessary to beat the tendency out of them with consistency).

Do you know how Gemini generated the essay exactly? Is it actually still a single straight-line forward pass as it was when chat assistants first became a thing (this would put it deeper in the "scary alien intelligence" class), or does it perform some CoT/planning, possibly hidden?

*In self-demonstrating irony, "malapropism" is not quite the right word for this, but I can't think of a word that fits exactly! Rather than actually taking into account what exactly, in this context, wishing for the advisor to become foolish is more of than wishing for the advisee to drop dead, it feels like just picking, from among all vaguely positive choices of A in "not X, but something more A", the one that is most common (even if it happens to just denote the nonsensical "deep").

These days with the thinking models the model first thinks about what to write (generating some thinking tokens) and then does a forward pass with the thinking tokens as context.

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