Comment by bananaflag
10 hours ago
> If someone wrote a definition of AGI 20 years ago, we would probably have met that.
No, as long as people can do work that a robot cannot do, we don't have AGI. That was always, if not the definition, at least implied by the definition.
I don't know why the meme of AGI being not well defined has had such success over the past few years.
"Someone" literally did that (+/- 2 years): https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-540-68677-4
I think it was supposed to be a more useful term than the earlier and more common "Strong AI". With regards to strong AI, there was a widely accepted definition - i.e. passing the Turing Test - and we are way past that point already: ( see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674 )
I have to challenge the paper authors' understanding of the Turing test. For an AI system to pass the Turing test its output needs to be indistinguishable from a human's. In other words, the rate of picking the AI system as human should be equal to the rate of picking the human. If in an experiment the AI system is picked at a rate higher than 50% it does not pass the Turing test (as the authors seem to believe) because another human can use this knowledge to conclude that the system being picked is not really human.
Also, I would go one step further and claim that to pass the Turing test an AI system should be indistinguishable from a human when judged by people trained in making such a distinction. I doubt that they used such people in the experiment.
I doubt that any AI system available today, or in the foreseeable future, can pass the test as I qualify it above.
People are constantly being fooled by bots in forums like Reddit and this one. That's good enough for me to consider the Turing test passed.
It also makes me consider it an inadequate test to begin with, since all classes of humans including domain experts can be fooled and have been in the past. The Turing test has always said more about the human participants than the machine.
Completely disagree - Your definition (in my opinion) is more aligned to the concept of Artificial Super Intelligence.
Surely the 'General Intelligence' definition has to be consistent between 'Artificial General Intelligence' and 'Human General Intelligence', and humans can be generally intelligent even if they can't solve calculus equations or protein folding problems. My definition of general intelligence is much lower than most - I think a dog is probably generally intelligent, although obviously in a different way (dogs are obviously better at learning how to run and catch a ball, and worse at programming python).
I do consider dogs to have "general intelligence" however despite that I have always (my entire life) considered AGI to imply human level intelligence. Not better, not worse, just human level.
It gets worse though. While one could claim that scoring equivalently on some benchmark indicates performance at the same level - and I'd likely agree - that's not what I take AGI to mean. Rather I take it to mean "equivalent to a human" so if it utterly fails at something we're good at such as driving a car through a construction zone during rush hour then I don't consider it to have met the bar of AGI even if it meets or exceeds us at other unrelated tasks. You have to be at least as general as a stock human to qualify as AGI in my books.
Now I may be but a single datapoint but I think there are a lot of people out there who feel similarly. You can see this a lot in popular culture with AGI (or often AI) being used to refer to autonomous humanoid robots portrayed as operating at or above a human level.
Related to all that, since you mention protein folding. I consider that to be a form of super intelligence as it is more or less inconceivable that an unaided human would ever be able to accomplish such a feat. So I consider alphafold to be both super intelligent and decidedly _not_ AGI. Make of that what you will.
Pop culture has spent its entire existence conflating AGI and ‘Physical AI’, so much so that the collective realization that they’re entirely different is a relatively recent thing. Both of them were so far off in the future that the distinction wasn’t worth considering, until suddenly one of them is kinda maybe sorta roughly here now…ish.
Artificial General Intelligence says nothing about physical ability, but movies with the ‘intelligence’ part typically match it with equally futuristic biomechanics to make the movie more interesting. AGI = Skynet, Physical AI = Terminator. The latter will likely be the hardest part, not only because it requires the former first, but because you can’t just throw more watts at a stepper motor and get a ballet dancer.
That said, I’m confident that if I could throw zero noise and precise “human sensory” level sensor data at any of the top LLM models, and their output was equally coupled to a human arm with the same sensory feedback, that it would definitely outdo any current self-driving car implementation. The physical connection is the issue, and will be for a long time.
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I think your definition of it being 'human level' is sensible - definitely a lower bar to hit than 'as long as people can do work that a robot cannot do, we don't have AGI'.
There is certainly a lot road between current technology and driving a car through a construction zone during rush hour, particularly with the same amount of driving practice a human gets.
Personally I think there could be an AGI which couldn't drive a car, but has genuine sentience - an awareness of being alive, although not necessarily the exact human experience. Maybe this isn't AGI, which more implies problem-solving and thinking rather than sentience, but in my gut if we got something sentient but that couldn't drive a car, we would still be there if that makes sense?
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