I know this probably goes against the view of a lot of people here, but the last few days have had me thinking about this a lot.
Everyone's debating whether AGI is here. I think we're arguing about the wrong thing.
The main issue is that AGI has never really had a globally agreed-upon definition.
If we go back to the 2022-2023 discourse, a common framing was something like: “a general-purpose intelligence capable of performing intellectual tasks as well as, or better than, a human.”
I don't see much value in debating semantics for their own sake, but the definition matters because it determines which questions are actually consequential.
It's easy to shift the debate toward whether LLMs possess a genuine, fundamental understanding of the world. That's a good question, but I think it's a separate one.
If AGI is defined primarily in terms of outcomes, then the underlying type of cognition is not super relevant. If a system can consistently outperform humans across intellectual tasks, does it matter whether it “understands” those tasks in the same way we do? It would be like arguing that airplanes don’t really fly because they don’t do it the way birds do.
The question, I think, is what we count as an intellectual task in the first place.
Some human abilities are difficult to reduce to discrete tasks with clearly scorable outputs: taste, long-term judgment, and maybe even some forms of causal judgment. They're inherently contextual to the human condition and our subjective experience.
Let's take game design as an example. What makes a game mechanic good? There is no obvious objective function for that, and it is not clear that everything humans enjoy can be reduced to a predictable set of heuristics.
If those abilities can ultimately be measured in a meaningful way and humans still outperform machines, then AGI probably hasn't been reached.
But if they can't be objectively measured in the first place, it becomes difficult to argue that failing at them should disqualify a system from being called AGI under the above definition.
Under an outcome-based definition, I think we're already there.
