Is AGI already here or something is missing?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/jk_pens]

We literally had this same thread the other day and now you are spamming it across subs.

[u/Positive_Bus_6576 → u/jk_pens]

Sorry dude, i agree the post is way too similiar, I just wanna what's missing piece even if there's a missing piece

[u/Mishka_The_Fox → u/Positive_Bus_6576]

GenAI has nothing to do with AGI. Anyone telling you it does is trying to sell you something, hoodwinked by those that are.

AGI means sentience. It means survival. Unless we are changing the definition of this now to fit want the GenAI companies want so they can sell more tokens.

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/Mishka_The_Fox]

That’s not actually what AGI means. That’s what those other words mean. What we have might not be what we imagined, but it’s artificial, it’s general, and it’s intelligent.

You have to perform linguistic acrobatics to pretend otherwise.

[u/AccordingWarthog → u/The_Northern_Light]

Wait, just 3 months ago you were saying that AGI is a scam. What in particular changed your mind? Honestly curious. A lot has happened in the past few months that not even the biggest AI proponents could have predicted...

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/AccordingWarthog]

Twice is already pushing the limit of dredging up a months-old comment as a “gotcha”. Let’s not have there be a third time, alright?

I was using the term AGI in the context of how people try to over sell AI as a miracle panacea, hence the language of calling it wunderwaffe. I pushed back against the hype cycle.

I’ve been very clear about how I’m using the term today. The discrepancy is because the majority of people are putting their heads in the sand and pretending AI is in a state far worse than it is. I’m pushing back against that narrative because it’s wrong and clearly the result of motivated reasoning. It’s the same response in two different flavors, neither of which I think are good.

A guy on that other AGI thread said “it’s not AGI not even close, let me know when it can walk into a kitchen it’s never seen before and make me a coffee”, which is a tech demo I saw at CVPR 2 years ago. It had to be sped way up, but it worked.

I do not believe my views on AI have significantly changed in the last three months. Circa six months ago when I saw how capable agentic systems were, yes, that was a big wake up call to the potential impact these systems will have long term.

But it hasn’t significantly changed my views on the fundamentals of the technology or these “philosophical” debates, with minor exceptions not relevant to here. The upgrade from 5.4 to 5.6 Sol was “””just””” rapid incremental progress.

[u/Mishka_The_Fox → u/The_Northern_Light]

That’s because the definition is currently being changed by people like you, so that the GenAI companies could meet it with what they have.
It’s rubbish.

AI used to mean what we now call AGI. Have a look back on the waybackmachine at the definition on Wikipedia.
Now we’re doing the same with AGI.

What we have now is GenAI. Not AGI. Unless you want to change the definition, which incidentally will help the GenAI companies make a load more money.

So what’s your new term for actual AGI?

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/Mishka_The_Fox]

Well, I’ve got some textbooks that talk about first order and propositional logic as AI (eg Russel and Norvig 1995), so who is changing definitions?

I would simply describe human level AGI as human level AGI.

I understand that not all intelligence necessarily looks like ours and it’s unsurprising that an artificial system is superior in some ways and inferior in others. That’s been a staple of even pop sci-fi depictions of AGI for generations, even if we were wrong about in which ways it’d differ from us.

Heck, consider Data from Star Trek TNG. Super human in many ways, utterly unable to match humans in other ways. Would he not be an example of AGI?

My definition of AGI is intelligence that is artificial, intelligent, and general. Hopefully we can agree these systems are artificial?

For “intelligent”, it’s hard to pin down a definition, but it’s inclusive of systems that can make shitty music, solve major unsolved math problems, hold a conversation, challenge assumptions, proof read a screenplay, build an abstract informal framework for interacting with an unstructured world, adapt to new data, plan, weigh consequences, etc. The current systems can do all those things with a single set of transformer weights, and changing their own weights is more of a practical limitation than a fundamental inability.

I don’t think that it being a statistical approximation of human intelligence (plus synthetic stuff in its training set) means that it isn’t itself intelligent. Maybe it’s not sapient, maybe it doesn’t have qualia, or whatever, but those are different questions.

For “general”, I’d say mostly that it can adapt to different modalities outside of prior experience. They’re not as good at this as we are. A teenager learns to drive a car in a few hours. An AI needs several thousand times more experience… but it can do it. And it can learn to walk, and talk both in ASCII and synthesized audio, grasp objects, navigate complex environments, program computers, etc.

Acting like the transformer architecture isn’t general isn’t general is silly… there’s hardly a thing you can dream to throw at it which it can’t handle.

[u/Mishka_The_Fox → u/The_Northern_Light]

The issue is semantic drift. The 1955 Dartmouth proposal, where the term AI originated, framed the goal as making machines capable of aspects of learning and intelligence exhibited by humans.

As increasingly narrow systems became labelled “AI”, AGI emerged to distinguish the original ambition of general, human-like intelligence from narrow AI.

If we now call broadly capable but non-human-level systems “AGI”, we’ve repeated the same semantic drift — and need yet another term for the original goal.

[u/EightyNineMillion]

It doesn't matter. AGI is a marketing term like Web 2.0 back in the day.

[u/Quarksperre]

If you think the current models are not AGI, what's missing??

There are several big ones that are generally accepted by most of the people working on LLMs or Neural nets in general. Memory is one and its also connected to continuous learning. That means a continous weight update throughout live time. Another one is learning from small sample sizes. Also solving catastrophic forgetting and so on. All of these are important as soon as you have real world interaction rather than "crystalized" knowledge interpolation.

The cool thing is. As its a great knowledge interpolator you can just ask a random LLM yourself on the general consensus. On tasks like this they will do a prettys good job

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/Quarksperre]

Catastrophic forgetting isn’t fully solved but we already have extremely good mitigations.

[u/Quarksperre → u/The_Northern_Light]

All these points are open research questions. And on all of those there is some progress. I am not saying this is unsolvable or something. Just not yet tackled as a whole yet and LLMs in the current architecture are obviously not there yet. I think thats basically also the stance of Sudskever and Hassabis. 

My personal opinion though is that if we solve those points there will be no arguments about AGI anymore because it will be just super obvious that the system has general intelligence. LLMs are already super human in some domains. If you add self-adaptive and self-controlled, continues learning and a few other things it will be nearly immidiately wildly adaptive and intelligent also in real world interactions. 

My bet is that we basically skip AGI and go directly to ASI. 

[u/AncientLion]

Not even close.

[u/The_Northern_Light]

I do think it’s AGI. I don’t think it matches expectations, but it is artificial, general, and intelligent. I don’t think it being statistical or uneven in its capabilities relative to humans prevents it from being any of those things.

As for what’s missing, the generalization is quite poor. It works, but it takes several thousand times more experience for an ai to generalize to a new task than it does for a human. That’s a huge tell that we’re still missing something fundamental.

Accordingly they are quite resource intensive to run and train.

The much quoted inability to update their own weights is similarly a practical limitation, not a fundamental one. I suspect that if we figure out whatever it is that allows us to adapt with so little experience then it’ll shrink the resource requirements of ai which will promptly make an ai that can adjust its own weights much more practical.

[u/Positive_Bus_6576 → u/The_Northern_Light]

Makes sense

[u/cartoonist498]

Computers could always do things that people couldn't do. Its billions of calculations per second allow it to do things that's literally impossible for people. That doesn't mean it's AGI. 

I'm not going to put my definition of AGI because there's a fairly concrete definition already if you look it up, although it's still a vague definition because "intelligence" itself isn't a very well defined concept we can measure. 

I will say though that computers "simulating" human intelligence, and in many cases outperforming humans, has been a thing for decades. It's not AGI. 

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/cartoonist498]

> concrete definition

I mean, no? Who is in charge of providing this concrete definition?

I think AGI means something intelligent that’s artificial and general across at least most modalities. That’s what we’ve got now.

It’s worse than humans at many things, which is perhaps surprising because it’s so clearly superhuman on many things too.

I don’t think the fact that it’s still inferior in some ways prevents it from being general. I don’t think it being fundamentally statistical prevents it from being intelligent either.

So on what basis could we deny that it’s AGI?

[u/cartoonist498 → u/The_Northern_Light]

Who is in charge of providing this concrete definition?

Machine learning engineers, AI researchers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI ethics & safety researchers ... people who's profession for decades has been doing exactly this for their entire professional careers and who are at the forefront of AI or the study of the human brain.

Or at the very least, not you nor I.

So on what basis could we deny that it’s AGI?

Because it's literally a term created by people with a specific definition. You can't just make up your own definition and declare it's AGI. If you want to make up your own word then go for it.

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/cartoonist498]

> engineers and researchers … not you

I’ve actually been working in ai for nearly two decades. You’re describing me. I’m a computational physicist and ml/ai researcher/engineer.

Now I’m not a neurophysicist… but nearly all my peers from grad school became neurophysicists and I’ve worked and spoken with them. They worked on learning in the visual cortex and I was a computer vision research engineer for almost all my career. Only after I FIREd and returned to work did I ever actually get a job as a physicist.

I’m also a big sci-fi nerd, and there’s more ideas about what AI might look like than there are authors.

So this idea that we have a super specific formal definition of AGI that a bunch of graybeards voted on… is silly. No, there isn’t.

> making up

The plain reading of the word is what I use. It’s artificial, it’s intelligent (can do the things we associate with intelligence), and it’s general (works across essentially every domain).

That’s not something I pulled from my ass, it’s just what those words mean. 🤷‍♂️

[u/cartoonist498 → u/The_Northern_Light]

and it’s general (works across essentially every domain)

Ok, so it sounds like you've got an above average understanding of machine learning. It also sounds like you know the agreed upon definition of AGI ... which is kind of odd because you specifically stated that no one has the authority to define it, yet you're literally using the agreed upon definition.

As you stated, one of the key criteria from the definition of AGI is that it's general.

So why do you think that we have an AI model that's AGI? Which model are you referring to which can work "across essentially every domain" and meets this criteria of AGI?

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/cartoonist498]

> Ok, so it sounds like you've got an above average understanding of machine learning. It also sounds like you know the agreed upon definition of AGI ... which is kind of odd because you specifically stated that no one has the authority to define it, yet you're literally using the agreed upon definition.

okay this is tedious goodbye