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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

Ten years ago people would have unambiguously identified what we had today as AGI.

As long as you don't see thousands of AI businesses that are run entirely without humans people will reject the idea that they are AGI. People could easily do that today if these models were AGI since its not hard to put them in a loop and tell them to run a business, so we know when that threshold is reached.

And if the AI isn't general enough to handle every part of a business well then you will not convince people that its AGI.

This hasn't changed from 10 years ago, this level was always what people imagined about the future of AI.

This. I don't know why people think the goalposts have moved.

Ten years ago, AGI implied general intelligence, as opposed to ML models that had learned specific tasks. It meant a model that could reliably zero-shot problems you threw at it to human level without being specific models trained for that task. As recently as 2024, DeepMind's framework had:

> a Competent AGI must have performance at least at the 50th percentile for skilled adult humans on most cognitive tasks

and "emerging AGI" as

> "equal to or somewhat better than an unskilled human"

The moving the goalposts here is people saying it has to outperform humans on literally every task to be AGI. We have artificial general intelligence by any reasonable definition; people here are complaining we don't have super-intelligence.

I don't get it... you seem to be quoting some definitions from DeepMind's Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI[0] for competent and emerging AGI from July 2024, and yet you're saying that anybody that doesn't follow those new definitions did move the goalpost in 2016?

[0]: https://deepmind.google/research/publications/66938/

> The moving the goalposts here is people saying it has to outperform humans on literally every task to be AGI

You don't have to outperform humans to run a business, nobody said you have to outperform humans on everything. Humans can run businesses, so AGI should be able to as well.

As long as humans outperform AI on a lot of tasks we have yet to reach AGI, and the easiest way to see that is that business still hires humans to do knowledge work and businesses are still lead by humans.

A lot of businesses have physical requirements. AGI has nothing to do with robotics so its hard for me to say you have to be able to replace a random business to be AGI. Definitely feels like we'd have AI investment firms if we had agi though

What does that even mean? They would have tried the models, noticed their limitations, and decide it's not AGI. Same as today.

Two hundred years ago people would have unambiguously identified what we had today as mAGIc.

thats true even before GPT

I suppose that talking machine wouldn't be that surprising for them in the overall bundle of magic and miracles.

Unambiguously?

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