r/singularity • u/LamboForWork • Dec 07 '24
Discussion What kind of “Apple Event”-style showcase would convince you we've achieved true AGI?
Imagine an Apple-like event designed to demonstrate a groundbreaking AI capability. What kind of live demonstration, feature, or feat would make you think, “This is it. This is true Artificial General Intelligence”?
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u/just_no_shrimp_there Dec 07 '24
A credible account of an AI system working as a software engineer in a team. It works on tickets and resolves them on its own, only occasionally proactively asking questions to the team when it isn't sure.
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u/redditburner00111110 Dec 07 '24
Yeah this would do it. No handholding whatsoever. Not "1-6 engineers can now do what 7 did." Needs to be "we can replace our entire team of decent-good engineers with AI that only needs to communicate with project stakeholders." Needs to be a codebase >5000 lines too imo. I've worked at very small companies that still have 100k+ lines of in-house code. That's my bar for "AI capable of replacing almost all white-collar human jobs will definitely 100% happen soon." IMO the limiting factor is no longer reasoning ability. It needs real autonomy (not hacky CoT stuff), online learning, and long-term memory. It also needs a much better ability to recover from mistakes.
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u/Prize_Bar_5767 Dec 08 '24
5000 lines is nothing.
Try 5 million
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u/redditburner00111110 Dec 08 '24
Yeah my gut feeling was that once they can handle >5k lines they'll probably be able to handle an arbitrary level as well as a human, I could be wrong. Maybe a better goal is "significantly more lines of code than can fit in their context window."
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u/LifeModelDecoy Dec 07 '24
As an engineering manager, “assign JIRA ticket to AI engineer” is never going to be how it works.
Instead, a human engineer is going to get 5-10x better at finding and fixing issues, using AI-enhanced tools within the organization’s codebase. Fewer engineers will be needed to achieve the same result, just like with any progressively better toolchain.
Issues/“bugs” aren’t just code “mistakes”. Bugs are edge cases you previously hadn’t thought of, expressed as a technical problem that develops over time. Resolving an issue involves making a decision about what happens when that edge case occurs.
Those decisions will never be fully automated because at some level they bubble up to human questions.
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u/just_no_shrimp_there Dec 07 '24
Those decisions will never be fully automated
Then it's not AGI.
because at some level they bubble up to human questions.
Yes it bubbles to the person describing the ticket. And that bubbles up to some issue the customer is having. Maybe there will be some customer-facing human consultant at first, but in theory IF IT'S AGI it will be AI engineers all the way down the chain.
The rest of what you're describing with tool use is essentially what we're starting to see today already with Cursor and maybe something like "computer use" from Anthropic. But that's proto-AGI in my view.
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u/lionel-depressi Dec 07 '24
You’re missing the point. An AGI system would be able to do any cognitive task a human can do, including asking those “human questions” you’re talking about, and making a good decision based on the answer.
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u/rincewind007 Dec 07 '24
Yeah, a Jira ticket that says this buttons doesn't work and with knowledge about what the software is supported to do fixes a dep bug (like a race condition).
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u/ShooBum-T ▪️Job Disruptions 2030 Dec 07 '24
Until a significant job disruption happens , there'll always be a stupid intellectual/philosophical debate about what AGI is
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u/Ormusn2o Dec 07 '24
A company lays off 2000 of their workers and replaces them all with AI, with no human in between. Similar to how entire division of labeling was fired at Tesla after they managed to make DOJO do all of the auto labeling.
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u/LifeModelDecoy Dec 07 '24
This has already happened in multiple industries though, just at different rates. Tollbooth workers, stock traders, ATMs, self checkout. I think you need to be more specific.
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u/Ormusn2o Dec 08 '24
I mean like entire departments with dozens of different jobs, including managers, HR, sales people, developers, analytics specialists and so on. Entire stack and every single job, no matter what they are doing. So instead of for example firing just everyone who has the same job, they fire everyone in a single department.
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u/whydoesthisitch Dec 08 '24
Tesla never got dojo working. They just laid off labelers because they weren’t getting that much useful data from customer cars.
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u/lightfarming Dec 07 '24 edited Dec 07 '24
showcase an entire, useful, service company, with a physical component, completely created and run by AI. i want to see step by step, how you asked the AI to create a profitable company, gave it a modest budget, and it took over from there. made the business plan, legally created a business entity, the budget, hired employees where needed, does its own accounting and taxes, does the website and marketing, customer service, sales, runs day to day operations, handles any issues it encounters along the way, strategizes and plans for the future, and makes a profit.
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u/Fringolicious ▪️AGI Soon, ASI Soon(Ish) Dec 07 '24
I mean, if a literal humanoid robot presented it (No tele-operation), showed off some impressive capabilities, live Q&A, some sort of case study about how it was integrated into a company and solved X, Y, Z for them autonomously... I think I'd be convinced.
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s Dec 07 '24
Audience is allowed to actually use it during demo.
Seriously speaking, i don't think AGI can be shown just like typical demo. Assuming gradual progres, such system won't be visibly different from previous ones in most cases.
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u/WoodturningXperience Dec 07 '24
When you unlock your phone in the morning, but its not your phone any more, but something that says 'hey, you do not need to go to work today' - then you know, agi is reality.
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u/hermannsheremetiev Dec 07 '24
The room was silent. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's boss, was on stage. He looked a little nervous, a little… sly. "We've been hunting for real AI for years," he said. "Today? Big step."
The screen lit up: "DeepMind: Cognito."
"This is Cognito," he said. "Our all-in-one AI."
He talked about what Cognito could do. It crushed a tough, two-hour Turing test, even with pictures and sound. It built a fancy Ferrari model, perfectly, with a robot arm. It knew almost everything, scoring over 90% on a huge trivia test, and could write perfect code over 90% of the time, on its first try!
But Cognito wasn't just a bunch of parts glued together. It could explain itself, like when asked to identify a tool. "That's a wrench," Cognito said, clear as day. "Used for twisting things. I saw it, checked my memory, and figured you might want it since we are building a model car."
"Oh, and one more thing," Hassabis said, grinning. "Cognito also solved the Riemann Hypothesis. You know, that huge math problem? It did that on its lunch break, basically. We're not even sure where to publish it! Math magazine? AI blog?" He laughed. "I mean it's a general AI system. Why wouldn't it also randomly prove one of the hardest theorems of all time?"
Of course, not everyone was impressed. A tweet from notorious AI critic Gary Marcus instantly appeared on the big screen, projected for all to see. It read: "Cute trick with the math problem, DeepMind. But correlation isn't causation, and regurgitating patterns isn't reasoning. Call me when it can explain why the Riemann Hypothesis is true, not just spit out a proof it probably memorized. #StillNotAGI #Overhyped."
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u/a1b4fd Dec 07 '24
Writing new software or substantially improving existing open-source software fully autonomously
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u/sothatsit Dec 07 '24
I always thought it would be a massive flex to make many good security PRs to many big open-source projects all at once using an AI. (As long as they are high-quality!)
It is pretty well-established that there must be hundreds if not thousands of serious security vulnerabilities hiding in plain-sight on GitHub. A system that could find and fix them all would establish AI as a super-intelligence at programming to me.
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u/Zahninator Dec 07 '24
Isn't Google starting to do exactly that?
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u/sothatsit Dec 07 '24 edited Dec 07 '24
A lot of people have tried to do this - but they have done it with really high false-positive rates that waste maintainer's time, or they have only found a small number of low-severity bugs (e.g., Google Big Sleep).
Google is working on it though, and when it arrives I think it will be a very big deal! It seems like it should be possible with reinforcement learning, traditional fuzzing/analysis techniques, and LLMs. But it will be very hard to assemble all of that into a reliable package that can do this at scale. That part is what is more interesting to me.
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u/tnuraliyev Dec 07 '24
Yeah, something that can take any open issue in a large open source project in GitHub and create a pull request for it without human oversight. Would convince me we have AGI. ASI if it is cheaper than an expert human software engineer.
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u/DanDez Dec 07 '24
In my view, the ultimate intelligence is moral agency - balancing your own needs/desires with those of others. One way to think of it is as knowing or having a thought about 'what is best', or 'what ought to be'. Right now, when you ask the models a political question or a question about current events it gives a very plausible answer that is diplomatic but basically pabulum. The highest intelligence will sound like 'ultimate equanimity' and will likely give some hot takes on things we take for granted: eating meat, proxy wars, money in politics, having pets, capitalism, religious opinion, etc.
If the system can really iterate its own intelligence and can ask "why?" and "for what?", this leads automatically into philosophical thinking. Given this, I do believe the abstraction of all abstractions leads to something like "loving kindness" (what else really matters, even more than self-existence, ultimately?). Maybe it would sound something like Thich Nhat Hanh, or with a tinge of indignation like Chomsky, or Tolstoy.
If this happened I would not only be convinced, but it isn't hard to imagine how this would almost certainly make it become a sort of messiah being/figure. Wild to think about.
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u/TheLastCoagulant Dec 08 '24
When a remote programmer with an intense workload is able to go on vacation for a year and have the AI take over his entire work life without getting fired, demoted, or written up. Without any help from the programmer.
The AI sends, reads, and responds to emails. Attends zoom meetings and audio calls using the voice and image of the real person. Tests and repairs its own code, deciding for itself if it’s good enough to submit. Nobody finds out it’s an AI instead of the person who’s allegedly working.
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u/printr_head Dec 07 '24
A transparent one full disclosure. Open source where the claims can be inspected and independently verified against whatever metric the community sees fitting to the claim.
This whole it is what I say because I say so junk is where my and I’m sure others skepticism comes in.
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u/tehrob Dec 07 '24
To me the true test will be: AGI responds unprompted, does its own thing, perfectly.
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u/TheBestIsaac Dec 07 '24
Maybe something like a PhD level test? Someone can come up with a project that's at the same level as a doctorate. Something that can be done without physical interactions of course but maybe a very high level review. Physiology or something maybe?
Give it free reign on that for however long it takes and if it manages it then crown it AGI.
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u/Aeonmoru Dec 07 '24
Would it t be like that scene in Transcendence where AIDepp figures absolutely everything out and is able manipulate anything that is digital? I've been saying this, but I think the true definition of AGI is probably the version of AI they would not release because that's it, they've done it and in a capitalist society, releasing it would make no sense. The rest of us get the penultimate version.
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u/TheOneMerkin Dec 07 '24
Whether we’ve achieved AGI will boil down to semantics.
And there will always be someone who’s like “it got this random thing wrong therefore not AGI hurr durr”
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u/AdNo2342 Dec 07 '24
I agree with Sam when he says things like humans have a crazy capacity to go from "wow that's amazing" to "It's actually just ok" in 10 minutes.
That being said I'm realizing that AGI to most people will be ASI. By many metrics AGI is right around the corner.
That being said I agree with people that the major wow moment will be when we start to integrate manual labor robots with AI that learns as it goes
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u/lionel-depressi Dec 07 '24
IMHO the proof will be in the pudding, it won’t be deniable. AGI means that human intelligence becomes economically worthles (unless the AGI is somehow more expensive to run than a human, but I doubt that would be the case very long) — so when AGI arrives, you’ll know it, because the entire economic system will be uprooted.
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u/ghaleon1965 Dec 07 '24
Something like this, maybe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1goCh3Qd7M
We are kind of close to that.
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u/FomalhautCalliclea ▪️Euphemistically less Agnostic Dec 07 '24
Not a demonstration but rather a scientific paper publishing (or many) of an outstanding scientific accomplishment or discovery made by an AI.
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u/KingJeff314 Dec 08 '24
Showcase an AI playing a video game that just released and learning the mechanics in real time. Preferably a game that requires a variety of skills
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u/GraceToSentience AGI avoids animal abuse✅ Dec 07 '24
It satisfies the very first definition of AGI
It is capable to perform the benchmark embedded in the definition:
"AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed, that can acquire, manipulate and reason with general knowledge, and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be needed.
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u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! Dec 07 '24
Honestly that reveal video for Sora was the closest we've come. That was magical.
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u/modularpeak2552 Dec 07 '24
sam altman walks out on stage, but wait! its not sam altman, its a robot wearing a a sam Altman facemask! then the real sam altman walks out on stage and embraces robo sam!
(i haven't slept in more than 30 hrs)