Comment by dist-epoch

Surely part of the problem is that intelligence seems to be implicitly conditioned on embodiment, to the point that "covering only cognitive tasks" seems inherently ill-defined or arbitrary. Everything we do is a cognitive task. At some point, the criticism will be "sure, it can solve research-grade math problems, but it can't fold my laundry".

Even our large language models have an implicit embodiment in the domain of text (and more recently, multimodal inputs). That seems sufficient for certain things, and insufficient for others. I suspect that AGI that does everything a human can do eventually turns out to be fairly analogous to humans in terms of sensory input and domain output, even if the scale is radically different (e.g. thousands of robots uploading (touch, sight, audio, smell, etc.) sensory data to a single model, and each being actuated individually).

> can match or exceed human cognitive abilities across a wide range of tasks

If you go by definition AGI is not general, just "smart ape" shaped.

>AGI has a pretty precise definition, covering only cognitive tasks.

OpenAI's own charter defines AGI as "Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". This is actually fairly sensible and involves obviously a ton of non-cognitive, emotional, social and physical activity. In other words, if you can replace most or all human beings with a machine, you have something that's generally intelligent.

That's obviously not even remotely where we're at, AI chatbots do well on narrow usually text based or programmatic problems, but can't even replace a barista or a plumber.