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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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Does this mean AGI is here?

AGI is here when we can't make ARC-AGI 4 (that a median human can pass but the frontier can't).

Bernie Sanders today has introduced legislation calling for a ban on superintelligence with a 20 year prison term for attempted superintelligence

He should've just cited AI 2040 instead of that vague proposal. The rationalists are genuinely smart and dedicating their lives to this, and I really believe they are the ones who are best equipped to handle regulation, even if their plans sound infeasible and sometimes it seems they've given up (and the other times they're naively optimistic up to delirium). Imagine what our pre-ASI utopia would've been if only politicians listened to autists.


I'm interested to see if it can write like a normal human and be interesting. If not, maybe it's for the best.

AGI is here when we can't make ARC-AGI 4 (that a median human can pass but the frontier can't).

That's a good definition, but there's still the additional hurdle of being able to learn after pre-training. LLM's still do pretty poorly when they have missing or poisoned data in their pre-training. Whereas humans (some of us at least) really can "generalize" with much less data.

I'm interested to see if it can write like a normal human and be interesting.

One thing that LLM's are really weak at is modeling what humans find interesting. Also probably for the best.

being able to learn after pre-training

True AGI must be able to learn continuously, or at least emulate it well enough.