Comment by dgunay
7 hours ago
This is a big reason why I feel like even though LLMs are _effectively_ AGI in some regard, they also are a hack around what most people figured AGI would look like before the advent of LLMs. Humans can do metacognition, output multimodally at the same time (verbal _and_ physical intelligence go together to produce an expressive face while one talks), have a good sense for what they do and don't know, continuously take in and respond to the world around them in a (mostly) uninterrupted fashion without "turns", learn knew knowledge and retain it for their whole lives, etc. When you reduce a human to a text generator, yes obviously SOTA LLMs perform way better, but rather than invent something that can operate as an always-running "being", we've grafted a harness around an intelligence that is bound purely to speak only when spoken to. Maybe organic intelligence is already that, playing out at a super high refresh rate, but I don't know.
Current AI is arguably much more capable of multimodal output than humans. It can produce an incredibly vast variety of audio, images, and video. Humans are limited to producing the sounds we can make with meatflaps in our throats, and contorting various parts of our bodies to produce crude symbols and shapes.
(Very capable!) Embodiment, persistent operation and continuous learning are indeed things that still set us apart from AI. None of those are fundamentally difficult to solve, though.
More importantly, none of those are particularly relevant for being "intelligent": If a criminal threatened to kill your family unless you solve some difficult problem that requires only intelligence and you could choose any single person, animal, or AI to help you with it, which would you choose? Be honest.