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“AGI” never made sense to me. It’s a purely marketing term right? I’ve ignored it thinking it would go away, but it keeps coming up. I get that consciousness
by fxd 14d ago
“AGI” never made sense to me. It’s a purely marketing term right?
I’ve ignored it thinking it would go away, but it keeps coming up.
I get that consciousness differs from intelligence and that our waking awareness of life is a complete mystery.
Knowledge and thus intelligence however I consider as actively being solved by these large ML models. That is, with the right combination of machinery and know-how, you’ll get it.
But you’d be no nearer to solving consciousness.
Given this thought trajectory - what is AGI supposed to be?
- eagerpace 14d agoI like recursive self improvement instead. It seems like something that is actually quantifiable and kinda “the point” of why consciousness is important to humans.
- fxd 14d agoSo basically, being able to set it free on some long running goal and it sort of “lives” and autonomously does its own tasks? I wonder at what point consciousness is necessary… that is, if you can have anything like that without it. To the point that solving consciousness (and combining it with intelligence) is what gives you the autonomous, recursive, self-improving thing otherwise it can only drive in the dark and make big mistakes. To your point I think - it’s why we don’t see too many non-conscious advanced biology (it rarely survives against those with it).
- layer8 14d agoNot sure why you are bringing up consciousness, that’s largely orthogonal to intelligence. AGI is usually taken to mean the capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks, as opposed to being limited to certain kinds of tasks, or to not matching the general level of human intelligence in some respect. Intelligence, and hence AGI, doesn’t require consciousness or emotions or sentience.
- fxd 14d ago[dead]
- p1esk 14d agocapability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks What human intelligence do you mean? Genius? Professional? Educated? Random person? “Dumb” person?
- layer8 14d ago“General”.
- p1esk 14d agoSorry, I don’t know what this means when applied to intelligence
- drdeca 14d agoI think the distinction between these options probably doesn’t matter alll that much if the threshold you’re using is either “random person” or higher? Maybe bump it up to “random educated person”? They are still different concepts of course, but I imagine that once one is achieved, the others aren’t far off.
- p1esk 14d agoOk, but a random educated person will not perform well on vast majority of specialized tasks where professionals operate. A model like Astra probably will beat random educated person performance on majority of specialized tasks. It’s getting close to the level of professionals in many domains, and to genius level on some (e.g. math). I’m just trying to understand the implications of the current frontier model capabilities.
- drdeca 13d agoCurrent models can do a variety of tasks that requires substantial expertise for people to do, yes. But there are also many cognitive tasks that the typical educated person would do better at than these models. Like, e.g. long-term managing what a vending machine gets stocked with and what prices the items should be sold for. Or, various things like that. When there are essentially no more tasks like that, then we’ve reached AGI.
- meander_water 14d agoThe OpenAI charter defines it as: "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interview/ https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interv...
- fxd 14d agoSo vague it’s useless. We cannot in a declarative sense define what is economically valuable work even now let alone into the future. People take what they can get for pay. Very few individuals can demand a wage. The value of employment is obviously designed around that, not some arbitrary definition of “valuable”. Of course an AI will accept $0/hr, it doesn’t mean it does the job. Anyone who could accurately define the value of work would be wildly successful without having to try. That is not a useful definition for me unfortunately.
- jryle70 14d agoThat's the challenge of defining intelligence. What is intelligence? Do you want to take a stab at defining/quantifying it? I'm s afraid anything specific you can come up with will also be useless.
- fxd 13d agoNo it isn’t. Nobody said you had to equate “intelligence” with “value of work” and you got it wrong: I said it’s impossible to define that value, not intelligence. I’ve seen a dozen or so useful definitions of intelligence.
- mdp2021 14d ago> Knowledge and thus intelligence How can you conflate the two. > solving consciousness We are very much not interested in that. We just need a proper problem solver.
- fxd 14d agoRight, you are interested in “AGI” and presuming none of that requires consciousness right? For example, how do you know that “feeling pain” is not a functional prerequisite for a task. And that consciousness is a prerequisite for feeling pain
- mdp2021 13d agoBecause there is no feeling of pain involved during the reasoning about "How to improve the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific" for the human reasoner, hence there is no need to have any experience of pain for any reasoner.
- submain 14d agoUnproven, but it could very well be some problems require consciousness to be solved.
- mdp2021 13d agoExtraordinary claims require the effort of the proponent so that they can be accepted on the table and take some proportionate share of it.
- StopTheMods 14d ago[dead]
- benlivengood 13d agoAGI is the term invented because arguments about what AI meant had gotten annoying. Originally there was no distinction and people thought "AI" would mean human level intelligence. Chess and conversations and robotics and math all in one package. Then games and classification and some robotics got solved and called AI, but that didn't solve math or conversation or online learning or a host of other things, so AGI was coined to refer to most of the whole package, virtually all the capabilities you'd need to replace humans intellectually. Now we're quibbling about whether AGI includes robotics or full real-world physical agents or something less. The consensus now seems to be that once you've got human-level intelligence and planning and executive function then you get recursive self-improvement that can eventually autonomously solve the robotics and world-modeling and other portions of human-equivalence.
- grantcas 13d ago[dead]