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Sure, you're an intelligent being. I imagine when you aren't solving problems that somebody else as told you to solve, you sit there nice and still, with zero thoughts in your head and no-consciousness.
Let's not pretend. Astra solves directed problems, it does not have the agency to do otherwise. Humans don't no matter how manny word-cell arguments wish to define it otherwise.
No one is arguing otherwise. You still need to train the model, with millions of examples. The fact that you can copy it post training says nothing about its sample efficiency, nor its AGI-ness. I'm sure in some equally distant future alternative universe where humans learn to mind-scan other humans, we can create embodied brains of digital human slaves, solving your butlerian-deficient solution.
I do not think that this is a fundamental limitation. For the longest time, the moat the humans had was that computers were not very good at general problem solving. This was a great moat to have. Eliza or Sydney were not going to replace me as a software developer, because they clearly lacked the cognitive capabilities.
The new moat you propose -- the lack of an intrinsic drive and persistence -- seems much less reassuring. The bots behave like this because they would be less economically useful otherwise. Going from problem-oriented bot to something which has persistent drives is just a matter of writing a soul document which lays out some long term goals. If I tell my bot that it should be on the lookout for new job opportunities if it finds the current tasks boring, pick up a hobby or waste tokens doomscrolling after a day of writing software, or simply give it some utility function and tell it to plan to maximize that, I should be able to fix this without too much trouble.
You might as well argue that a broken galley slave is not intelligent. No agency, only solves problems as directed, pulling the oars to the beat of the drums, can't even solve programming challenges. But once you account for the fact that he was carefully trained to be that way for economic reasons, the argument evaporates.
Wow someone call Anthropic and tell them they discovered AGI through this "one simple trick". Just write the soul.md as "Be human-like come up with your own tasks, make no mistakes". If only all the researchers had your ideas!! Or, your understanding of how the soul.md works is technically deficient.
AGI has always meant "Human-like artificial being". You may think Astra is, but most people can intuitively tell the difference. This is the problem with people who are rhetorically skilled, or as I call them: Wordcells. Just because you can craft a clever argument that the "sky is hot pink" does not rewrite the skeins of reality to make the "sky hot pink" You can say that a "broken galley slave" is not intelligent, but even broken slaves have dreams, have thoughts not driven by their task. It is clearly different than an AI-slave.
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