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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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In fairness, the goalposts were moved because we realized LLMs couldn't do certain AGI things despite passing the "AGI" tests.

Yeah, no argument here. Like you said, it's kind of natural that we adjusted our expectations as we learned more about the nature of intelligence (now that we have more than just one kind to generalize from). We sort of assumed that a lot of other human-like capabilities would necessarily come along for the ride when an AI passed the Turing Test, and that was wrong.

Just as long as we don't keep using "it's not true AGI!" as a cognitive stop sign to avoid recognizing the incredible progress we've made.

Although I agree with SnapDragon that they're "partial AGI". I believe the missing component is continuous learning: they start output like a human, as they've been trained to, so if they continued to be "trained" on their observations, presumably they'd continue to output like a human.

Indeed. I've heard of efforts to graft a learning layer onto LLMs (with a "memory" that's an embedding rather than just CoT text), but obviously it hasn't worked so far, and maybe it never will. Also that still seems like a short-term solution.