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Comment by js8

20 days ago

All I asked for was the OP to substantiate their claim that LLMs are not AGI. I am agnostic on that - either way seems plausible.

I don't think there even is an agreed criterion of what AGI is. Current models can easily pass the Turing test (except some gotchas, but these don't really test intelligence).

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js8

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blueprint  18 days ago

What people hope 'AGI' is would at least be able to make confirmations of fact and know what verification means. LLMs don't have 'knowledge' and do not actually 'reason'. Heuristic vs simulation. One can be made to approach the other, but only on a specific and narrow path. Someone who knows something can verify that they know it. An "intelligence" implies it is doing operations based on rules, but LLMs cannot conform themselves to rules that require them to reason everything through. What people have hoped AGI would be could be trained to reliably adopt the practice of reasoning. Necessary but maybe not sufficient, and I'm just gonna blame that on the term "intelligence" actually indicating a still relatively low level of what I will "consciousness".

  • js8  18 days ago

    I don't really follow what you're saying, so I'll keep it short. I have used Claude Opus 4.5 for coding and it certainly has knowledge and can reason.

    You're wrong on reliability. Humans are also quite unreliable, and formal reasoning systems in silico can actually fail too (due to e.g. cosmic rays), the probability is just astronomically low.

    And in engineering, we know quite well how to take a system that is less than 50% unreliable and turn it into something with any degree of reliability - we just run it over and over and verify it gives identical results.

    And Claude Code (as an LLM harness) can do this. It can write tests. It can check if program is running correctly (giving expected result). It can be made to any degree of reliability you desire. We've crossed that 50% threshold.

    The same happens when models are learning. They start with heuristics, but eventually they'll learn and generalize enough to learn whatever formal rules of logic and reasoning, and to apply them with high degree of reliability. Again, we've probably crossed that threshold, which is confirmed by experience of many users that models are getting more and more reliable with each iteration.

    Does it make me uneasy that I don't know what the underlying learned formal reasoning system is? Yes. But that doesn't mean it's not AGI.