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Comment by hereme888 | Hacker News Reader

Why is a >30-min context-length a requirement for AGI, or the naturalness of a human conversation?

Do you descend into repetitive, incoherent babble after a 30min, incredibly focused conversation? Does any human being without some sort of diagnosis? I assume you regularly have conversations that last more than 30 minutes (work meeting, for instance, which gpt could not participate in as an equal voice by any stretch of the imagination).

It’s an arbitrary number that felt high enough. If I said 10, people would argue that a frontier model can talk longer than that. But I have absolutely watched ChatGPT fall apart that quickly. I’m sure everyone reading this has.

We can nitpick the duration all you want, but we both know it does not take very long for this to occur. It happens particularly fast if you stray from the original topic and/or aren’t using a frontier model.

I work exclusively with OpenAI cloud models, and most high-quality agent harnesses auto-compact and does pretty well sticking to the plan of action. Papers that research the definition of AGI never include context length, and I myself don't see the logic for it either.

“It doesn’t count because I don’t include it”? AGI doesn’t have a clear definition, there’s no consensus here, so that’s just not convincing to me.

I am not going to call something “intelligent” when it can’t sustain a basic conversation.

I don't think there will ever be universal consensus on....anything. But significant research has been published into its definition, by researchers from the main LLM providers, like https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212

Also, I would say SOTA LLM models can sustain a longer, more intelligent conversation than most people. Just in context length alone, they can keep track of more context than humans. But they're nowhere near as efficient the human brain, or the attention to quickly connect and find decades worth of memory like us.

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