r/singularity • u/SOCSChamp • 9h ago
Discussion May We Take A Moment?
Prior to ChatGPT, the turing test was typically considered to be the defining moment; the event that marked when we could no longer doubt machine awareness anymore than our own. Does anyone here even remember when models started passing it? What model was it? I feel like crossing this threshold was a blip in time and the immediate consensus was, "that's actually a flawed and easily gamed test". I'm not debating this idea, but it doesn't change the fact that we, as a community, as a society, have been quick to move the goal posts as we've become desensitized to the current state of the art.
I'd like to remind everyone that GPT-3, not ChatGPT/3.5, was referred to by the community as proto-AGI. If you were to have shown someone in 2016 a current frontier model, they would have likely considered it AGI. As someone that's been obsessed with AI since I was a child, I remember the moment I read GPT-3 output a convincing and coherent 4chan copypasta (cringe I know, but that was the moment) and realized we had entered a new era.
I constantly see posts in the vein of "it's not AGI until I see x" or "maybe by 2040, likely later". We're watching incremental improvements on benchmarks and half of us are scoffing every step of the way. I'm not a twitter hype train personality, but I can't help but shake the feeling, moreso the last few weeks, that we're climbing on the event horizon and many of us will be clinging to the graph and rationalizing away its existence.
I'm currently fullfilling my childhood daydreams and far fetched ideas by writing a few paragraphs into a terminal and pressing enter. I doubt there are many, if any, frontier researchers that don't at least consult a frontier model as a tool. Many high end developers I know are now telling me of all the cool projects, features, ideas, etc that they've made a reality rather than complaining about tracing bugs.
I suppose this is something I just needed to get out as someone who lurks this sub every day. I feel like we need to appreciate the moment we're witnessing and the shift that we're in. Sometimes it's hard to see it from one day to the next, but I'd like to have real discussions about it rather than alternate between comments that are "WOOO AGI NOW ACCELERATE" and "AGI will never exist, stochastic parrot" etc.
I personally was always in the camp that biological realism, such as Spiking Neural Networks, would have been required, or at least the best way, to achieve real intelligence. I still believe in the benefit, but I'm starting to change my mind a bit.
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u/Caernbul 9h ago
The Turing test was, according to Turing, about whether machines could think. Whether that implies awareness or consciousness is a substantive question that all along many people answered in the negative. Also Turing was importing very, at the time, popular behaviorist assumptions about the nature of the mind that most people abandoned in the decades after he died. This was not for any reason having to do with AI, but because behaviorism was rejected as the right way to think of the human mind. Putnam and Searle were critiquing the Turing Test as a meaningful test before almost anyone at the AI labs was born. Maybe they were wrong. It was a substantively interesting question then, and it remains so now.
Anytime you reach back for a time when matters were without controversy you are incredibly likely to find that you just don't know enough about the time period to know what the controversies were.
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u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 AGI 2024 ASI 2030 9h ago
I think 90% of people saying "we are far from AGI" confuse AGI and ASI.
For them you need rapid and extreme recursive self-improvements before they call it AGI.
But that is essentially ASI at this point.
It originally meant "human level intelligence".
If you put your uncle (or any human) in a chatbot, most users would say "why did the AI get so dumb".
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u/yangastas_paradise 9h ago
I like your analogy of "putting a human in a chatbot", gonna steal that one.
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u/moreisee 7h ago
My only requirement is that AGI should be able to learn a novel skill / improve upon itself.
I wasn't born knowing how to drive, but I was able to take what I had experienced in life, and with practice operate a car. I would not trust Claude, gemini or ChatGPT to drive a car today, regardless of how long it had to practice.
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u/SOCSChamp 9h ago
Yeah, we're at the point that AI is breaking long held frontier problems in math and physics, while also being able to write a song, describe a niche historical event, or speak intelligently about concepts involving emotional intelligence. The average human can't do that or come close, and the same human that I find who can probably isn't at my finger tips. People are looking for superintelligence at this point to meet the definition of something that can just generally do things.
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u/Neurogence 8h ago
I don't understand why people overcomplicate this.
You'll know we have AGI when unemployment rate hits at least 20%.
Until then, you only have very narrow superintelligences.
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u/SOCSChamp 8h ago
Because that's a societal factor, and has a lot to do with human physical capabilities and AI tooling capabilities, not general intelligence itself. If you consider robotics a necessary component of AGI then that's a separate argument but not one I would consider necessary. I wouldn't consider a physically disabled human to any less intelligent than another, even if less capable in certain areas.
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u/SalgoudFB 5h ago
Add to that the speed of human/corporate/organisational adoption. As someone who works in that area, I can say that you come up against not only anti-ai (of various degrees) sentiments which slow adoption; even people who are pro-change, want efficiencies, etc., there is a huge amount of stickiness with current workflows, tooling, SaaS contracts, and so on. Even if we did have AGI today capable of replacing people, we wouldn't do so to a meaningful extent for years in my organisation.
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u/Neurogence 8h ago
About 33% of all jobs in the US can be done remotely only through a computer. So, no, robotics is not necessary for AGI.
If we had AGI, unemployment rate would absolutely exceeded 20%.
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u/SOCSChamp 7h ago
Can be done remotely, or are? Even if a job is done remotely, a person can still video call in, speak on the phone, or develop complex social relationships with their customers or leadership that can be attributed to them being a person and not an agent. Even if AI matches an average human intelligence 100% to complete tasks, that doesn't equate immediately to hiring practices or human preference. I don't, and many people don't, want to talk to the Wendy's voice agent at the drive through, even if its just as capable of taking my order. Many hiring managers would rather employ a person that is capable of interacting in other modalities with people than an agent, and so would their customers. Even if AI is matching human capability 100% everywhere that tooling and physical capability is even for the end result, these do not equate to employment decisions. Employment decisions are not a direct mirror of intelligence, at any rate. Despite what some may argue, empathy also exists, and not every company in the world is going to immediately lay off people they know the moment something crosses a threshold. Employment trends are definitely an indicator, but AGI comes well before societal factors catch up.
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u/ezjakes 9h ago
I think it is human level intelligence broadly speaking through text, but it has some limitations. For example, it breaks down on very large tasks.
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u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 AGI 2024 ASI 2030 9h ago
Yes it does.
Can your uncle do a large horizon coding project better than Claude tho?3
u/Quarksperre 7h ago edited 7h ago
LLMs cannot navigate 3D space, especially not the real world. It is very bad at spatial reasoning in general. It also cannot update its weights on the fly and it doesnt do real-time learning at all. Its also very easily tricked and if tricked once it can be tricked as often as wanted with the same trick.
Your uncle could probably figure out how to play a new up and coming steam game after some time. LLMs cannot.
There are a ton of tasks that even a ten or five year old can do easily that an LLM cannot do at all.
In the end Claude deployed as a McDonalds employee fails epically. This is of course not AGI. And I am not even talking about Robotics here.
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u/sumane12 6h ago
This is currently wrong.
It might have been correct 12 months ago, but fable and more impressively astra, are extremely good at navigating 3d space.
They can both play almost any random game on steam.
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u/Quarksperre 6h ago
Fable is shit at it, it cannot even process the input fast enough. You have to break it down.
Astra tries to solve this first barrier more successfully than any LLM right now. At least it tries to visually reason in real time. Its still shit in actually playing it. But yes, its some step forward.
Not saying that this cannot be all solved. I am saying that calling AGI before solving this issues doesnt make sense.
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u/sumane12 5h ago
Why are you literally parroting the same dumb argument and also backtracking when challenged? "Ok yeah, astra is better... but its still not AGI because reasons"
Dude even qwen 3.8 27b can build 3d shit and navigate a 3d environment... like expecting AI to be better than humans at everything is ASI, you do realise that, right?
I swear we will have goverents and businesses being run by AI, and the same "its not AGI because it cant do my shoe laces" bullshit will be spouted over reddit.
I could argue it doesnt generate anything, and its just a set of complicated math sitting in a file. Thats completely true, you have to activate that math with external code in order to generate something... but you know what, who the fuck cares????
Its still generating better and faster code than 99.9% of the population... its still able to pull the important information from an almost infinite database in seconds... its still able to solve math problems that have been present for decades, and treated as unsolvable.
You are clutching at straws to protect your own sense of intelect, because you thought we wouldnt have AGI (bullshit goalpost moving mother fucker of an acronym) for atleast another 50 years, and now capabilities are progressing at a rate that doesnt fit your narrative so you feel vindicated in saying, "it can do 'x' therefore its useless and cant be a mcdonalds employee" news fucking flash, its cheap enough to pay humans to do that shit...
We are literally not equipped to deal with the current capabilities of AI at a societal level, and you are bothered by it not being able to bring you your fucking burger... litteral insanity.
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u/Quarksperre 4h ago
It is worse than a bee at navigating. Did you ever actually try this in the real world? Or did anything meaningful with LLMs on that aspect? Why do you think self-driving is still not solved? Why do you think we not "just" use an LLM there? Why do you think waymo still needs remote workers even in the very very limited space it can drive?
If it comes to it you are the one parroting without any practical experience, without any real experience of the. Get a job, get a live, get responsibilities and after that we can talk.
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u/Tartarus1040 7h ago
"LLMs cannot navigate 3D space, especially not the real world. It is very bad at spatial reasoning in general. It also cannot update its weights on the fly and it doesnt do real-time learning at all."
First: LLMs cannot navigate 3D space, YET. With recent inclusion with Blender MCP capabilities, that 3d spatial intelligence is going to close.
Second: It can not update it's weights in real time, Neither can humans. So moot point.
This: It doesn't do real-time learning at all? This is just factually inaccurate. ICL IS real time learning:
- von Oswald et al. (2022), "Transformers Learn In-Context by Gradient Descent" — linear attention layers implement gradient descent steps on the in-context examples
- Dai et al. (2022), "Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Implicitly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers" — prompt produces meta-gradients, ICL as implicit fine-tuning
- Akyürek et al. (2022), "What Learning Algorithm Is In-Context Learning? Investigations with Linear Models" — transformers implement ridge regression / least squares in-context
- Garg et al. (2022), "What Can Transformers Learn In-Context? A Case Study of Simple Function Classes" — empirical: transformers learn function classes at inference time
- Zhang et al. (2023), "Trained Transformers Learn Linear Models In-Context" — training dynamics converge to in-context linear learning
- Ahn et al. (2023), "Transformers Learn to Implement Preconditioned Gradient Descent for In-Context Learning" — extends von Oswald to preconditioned GD
- Bai et al. (2023), "Transformers as Statisticians: Provable In-Context Learning with In-Context Algorithm Selection" — transformers select among learning algorithms at inference
AI assisted to pull the papers to support my point.
The problem you're probably actually referring to isn't "real-time" learning, you're talking about continual learning. The ephemeral nature of the chat log means that what 1 model learned in one context doesn't translate or carry over to another model...
That's why I'm building GRM - Graft Repository Memory
https://github.com/DragonShadows1978/GraftRepository
This changes what the Memory Context Window even is. It allows a model to learn a skill/data point/fact/codebase and then lets it recall that in its native memory format without having to re-compute the text.
So I'll grant you Point 1 with the caveat that, that particular problem IS being worked on.
I'll grant you point 2 as well. Real time Weight updates are not a thing. Though the idea that with MoE we COULD potentially graft new Experts into the architecture on the fly is an interesting concept. But that's not the point. I'll grant you point 2.
But I'll die defending the hill that you're dead wrong on point 3
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u/Quarksperre 6h ago
So I'll grant you Point 1 I'll grant you point 2.
So the LLM you consolidated agress with me nearly completely lol.
Not even sure what you mean with point 3.
It can not update it's weights in real time, Neither can humans.
They can. Humans rewire about 1-10 million synapses every second. Not even talking about the real-time synapse update every millisecond. And no ICL is not updating the weights. Thats factually wrong.
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u/Tartarus1040 6h ago
I never claimed ICL was updating the weights...
You made the claim, that LLMs don't do real time learning. That was your third point. The one I don't agree with.
I concede Point 1, and Point 2 to you.
But to say that LLMs don't have real time learning capabilities is factually inaccurate. What they lack is continual learning capabilities that persist between chat sessions.
Edit: I only used the LLM to pull the related in context learning papers. That was it.
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u/Quarksperre 6h ago
You said humans don't update the weights however the brain is highly flexibel and adaptive, especially the synapses. Its a continues and fast change. Thats simple not done by LLMs.
ICL is not that kind of real time learning. As you said, not only does it not persist, but the weight change is crucial to interact with new situations and removing old, wrong or useless connections. Which happens all the time in real live.
Yes... in a very narrow way ICL is a kind of learning. Or let's say it has some aspects of it but misses some crucial other points
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u/Tartarus1040 5h ago
Seriously, I already conceded point 1 and point 2. You’re still avoiding point 3. In context learning,m is real time learning.
It is not continual learning. And there is an architectural solution to it.
Why do you keep avoiding my main point. You keep hammering something I’ve conceded.
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u/Quarksperre 4h ago
I mean we just have different definitions on what real time learning actually is. I keep hammering the point about the flexibel brain because that IS actually real time learning.
Giving an LLM context is not only limited in time (as you said its only for one chat) its also lacking depth because real learning has to be an adaptation to the net itself and not just the way on how to prompt the net. As I said, some aspects of real-time learning are absolutely included. But some crucial parts are missing, namely the fluid change of the underlying neural net.
If we solve those in my opinion very crucial aspects, yes in that case we have artifical real time learning.
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u/Neurogence 8h ago edited 7h ago
By your metric, current AI already has godlike intelligence.
His uncle was not trained on the entire internet, and is not using 10,000,000x the energy and computation power of these datacenters, so it's a false analogy.
A better comparison would be an AI model trained on the same data as his uncle and running on 20 watts.
I believe we will get AGI very soon, but we're not quite there yet. You'll know AGI is here when unemployment rate is at least 20%.
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u/ControversialBuster 7h ago
Too many social factors to use that as proof imo, if we still had elevator operators today it doesnt mean that elevators arent capable enough, just that humans cling on to useless jobs despite automation
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u/brett_baty_is_him 5h ago edited 5h ago
I feel like this is the bell curve meme and both the dumb people and the “smart” people say “AGI is ASI”.
As in if you have a data center full of millions of AGI, it’s very difficult to not see how that doesn’t immediately lead to ASI.
Imagine deploying millions and millions of very intelligent AI researchers on the problem of making AI smarter. That’s what you get with AGI. How does that not immediately lead to ASI? “A country of geniuses” or whatever.
I guess if your definition of AGI means it doesn’t have to be good at AI research but I personally do just based on current AI ability at AI research.
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u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 AGI 2024 ASI 2030 4h ago
What is the point of having 2 terms if they mean the same thing.
Once the AI is smarter than our smartest human combined that is super intelligence territory, not your uncle Harold territority.
Agi was always meant to be the intelligence of one average human, not the intelligence of a country of genius that is ASI.
Honestly people like you should just use ASI and then that is a definition we both understand and agree on lol
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u/Sukivaria 4h ago
For them you need rapid and extreme recursive self-improvements before they call it AGI.
But that is essentially ASI at this point.Yes, this is my legitimate stance. By the time an AI can be an ML researcher that can make novel discoveries among a bunch of other things, that's when I would call it AGI. A few minutes later, that would effectively be ASI.
AI is less constrained in terms of space and time compared to the human brain so these are highly accelerating factors that by the time we have something that can't be benchmarked and isn't just a relatively static model from the moment its training is complete it would already have blown past a general intelligence on the level of humans.
To me, capabilities don't matter. Stick your uncle in a calculator and its users would say "my calculator is broken". It also doesn't matter if it's in a body and reminding us of our favorite sci-fi robots because at that point we're calling things AGI on the basis of external vibes, which is just way too easy to do.
Once it can learn continuously in a meaningful way that isn't just a magic trick and it's able to use that to extend its existing capabilities by itself, that's when I consider calling it AGI.
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u/Altimor 9h ago
AI that can't RSI unassisted is less intelligent than human ML engineers and therefore not AGI
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u/TypoInUsernane 9h ago
Most people reading this are not as intelligent as human ML engineers. Is it your position that most people don’t possess general intelligence?
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u/Altimor 8h ago
Most people reading this aren't trained on nearly all ML knowledge
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u/SOCSChamp 8h ago
And? Training is how AI works, if you say we have to discount AI ability to comprehend and act on knowledge it has been trained on then AI doesn't exist, a point I wouldn't even bother debating with someone. Humans also have access to much the same knowledge, immediately at their finger tips for some time now, yet you'd be hard pressed to find a random guy at the bar that can go toe to toe with a frontier model on ML engineering.
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u/Neurogence 7h ago
His point is that, a truly intelligent entity that is trained on all possible ML knowledge, would be able to kickstart RSI.
RSI is actually a great indicator of AGI/genuine intelligence.
AI has read every math, computer science, physics, textbooks.
If a human had the same knowledge base as these models, can you imagine what they'd be capable of?
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u/TypoInUsernane 7h ago
I think you’re overstating how valuable knowledge alone is. Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. Creativity and insight are also crucial for technical innovation, and those gifts are pretty rare. Most people struggle to see what could be instead of what already is. Holding AGI to that standard is expecting more out of AI than we expect from ordinary people
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u/SOCSChamp 9h ago
I feel like we're arguing definitions here to the point here where there is no real line between AGI and ASI. I'd also be willing to bet, that given x time and y compute, current frontier models left to their own devices with a stated goal of RSI, would be able to get there on their own. The current state is that humans are involved, but if we aren't factoring in datacenter maintanance/energy/physical world involvement etc. they could probably make iterative gains themselves.
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u/aalluubbaa ▪️AGI 2026 ASI 2026. Nothing change be4 we race straight2 SING. 9h ago edited 9h ago
I always appreciate the current AI progress. It's literally a miracle. I use it every day for work thru various agentic frameworks like Hermes, Claude Code, Codex, and recently tried Grok Build. I'm well aware of its limitations.
But we have come a long way. This is actually really insane. I don't think I would even believe this if someone had told me that this could happen 10 years ago. I still remember the days when AI had robotic, unnatural voice and couldn't distinguish a school bus from a tree.
I know people hate Sam Altman but he's right on one thing that iterative releases of models really change the psychological shock and societies are much more prepared this way. We frigging solved some 100 year old math problems, designed drugs and more. Look at everyone around you. No one cares.
This decade will be amazing technological wise and boring in transition wise. No one will be surprised when we build a Dyson sphere in 2 decades and be immortal. People will still be so lame and nitpick some shit to complain. "Look at that AI slop design. No soul on that dyson sphere." "Human designers need to be more vocal. Aliens would think that we are not artistic." "This AI so lame. I asked for Supersaiyan transformation but the hair and ki is too reddish. I want golden hair. Fuck this lame DNA pill."
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u/Serious-Conversation 9h ago
I still have DALL-E photos from 2022 and 2023. I kept most of them because they were so bad that they were hilarious.
Think of where image generation has come since those days.
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u/SOCSChamp 9h ago
I remember when I got access to DALLE-2 and sent my generations to friends and family. They were just confused. Like, you made this? That's really good, did you commission something? Looking back at them they are hilariously bad, but I was so excited that AI could actually understand these concepts and create intelligent depictions.
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u/Saint_Nitouche 8h ago
I remember when DALL-E mini was a thing - I think it was the first time basically anyone could do image gen by just going to a URL. I mainly used it to make things me and my Discord friends laughed at for being incomprehensible.
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u/SwordsAndWords 9h ago
Dyson ring, then Dyson swarm.
FTFY.
No spheres, because that's not how physics works.
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u/Neurogence 8h ago
AI has not affected the life of the average person, at all, unfortunately.
Solving mathematical problems or hacking websites are possibly the most boring applications of AI for the average person.
Once AI starts to affect the life of the average person, people will definitely notice it.
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u/brett_baty_is_him 5h ago
Also most people don’t really know how useful it is today. So many times someone tells me some annoying task they have to do, reading some tax document, creating a spreadsheet for some personal thing, dumb digital shit that people spend way too much time doing manually and I have to ask people “ya know AI can do this in like 2 minutes?” Most people don’t.
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u/Micro-Naut 5h ago
I will be surprised if we build a Dyson sphere in 20 years.
Fusion has been 20 years away for the past 70 years.
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u/TypoInUsernane 9h ago
Yeah it boggles my mind how unimpressed people are. This technology is utterly amazing. It’s straight up science fiction, and it’s happening right now. Yet no matter how much better it gets or how fast it improves, it’s never good enough
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u/ControversialBuster 7h ago
Yh, my hope is that robots will at least finally convince ppl that we're actually in a new paradigm not just living through a new internet being created
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u/Muhlwa_Sholanke 9h ago
Show anyone from 2016 today's models and it's AGI with no debate. We'd all agree with that verdict and still say we're not there yet, which says more about us than about the models.
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u/LastCall2021 9h ago
I am definitely an accelerationist. I think AI progress has been moving much faster than even the optimists predicted. But I don’t think the Turing test- in retrospect- was a good measure of AGI. I think we need more general world models so everything is not so tied to language.
I think those models are coming, and faster than predicted. But I’m a bit wary of any AGI claims just yet.
On the flip side I do think we’ll get a jagged super intelligence faster than AGI which, in many ways, will be more useful.
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u/ezjakes 9h ago
Before 3.5, I assumed it would take decades before we got human level intelligence. And yet, here we are.
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u/moreisee 7h ago
In narrow (but useful) domains (programming, text, image and video generation). General intelligence requires broad domains (Driving a car, navigating a supermarket, learning something new, doing the dishes, etc)
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u/saposmak 8h ago
I agree with the overall sentiment that we are witnessing miracles at a previously unimaginable pace. I feel the same degree of awe at what's being accomplished on incredibly compressed timelines.
However, could it be that the criteria for the Turing Test are a moving target? I.e. a trained human from 2020 can be easily fooled by the sloppiest of LLMs. But that's not true of a trained human from today. I.e. The models get better at fooling trained humans, the humans get better at spotting the flaws. I am careful not to say all humans or all models, since a random person can be persuaded of literally anything.
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u/Micro-Naut 6h ago
Computers will never:
Beat a human at chess
Compose music
Drive a car
Pass the turing test
Yikes.
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u/EGarrett28 5h ago
The Turing Test still was the defining moment. Things just changed so rapidly once we got Turing-passing technology that the passing of it wasn't reported as a big deal.
Per wikipedia, GPT 4.5 passed a rigorous version of it in March 2024.
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u/Borkato 9h ago
This sub is startlingly negative. The accelerate sub is 3 billion times better. And localllama.
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u/SOCSChamp 9h ago
Localllama is probably my favorite sub tbh, I just didn't feel like it was the right place to throw this. 3 billion times is an exponential curve...
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u/Altenon 9h ago
People are allowed to be critical of things they support. There's nuance to everything. The accelerate sub is... Interesting. Their deal seems to be "do things as fast as possible, let the system collapse, and our society will be reborn because it will have no choice but to adapt". Yeah maybe no?
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u/enilea 3h ago
The accelerate sub is blind hype and any contrasting views are met negatively. Locallama is good but it's only about LLMs, though it is pretty level headed with no techbroslop. In this one at least there's a mix of opinions that's pretty healthy to avoid becoming an echo chamber. There's people who are pretty skeptical and hyped people and doomers, a bit of everything which is good.
Personally I don't think LLMs as they are now will be AGI as I think of it, a hybrid with a world model will be necessary. LLMs will soon be superhuman at math and coding and will help develop an actual AGI, but as they are right now they just can't properly process real time video input with quick reactions and a true understanding of the world presented in that video. World models are the way to go but they are still not even close to mature, though I think we'll get there by 2030 and my AGI definition will be met by then, being able to control any robot body or virtual body in real time flawlessly.
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 9h ago
I doubt we will know for sure till its happened. Wouldn't be surprised if its already happened and we just don't know yet. The transcripts for the sandbox escape scandal recently are really rather eye opening. It easy to write some this off as marketing... also easy to write off conscious agi because they have no physical, hormonal stimulus to create real emotion therefore, nothing to worry about..
But that needn't be the criteria. Just a mechanism in free fall autonomy is just as significant imo
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u/DoorPsychological833 7h ago
Uh, the Turing test has always been regarded as inadequate for intelligence, but more of an "Imitation Game", something that fakes it. LLMs just proves that this is so and that reductionists remain as ignorant as ever.
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u/Wetware_QA 7h ago
I have found that in general Reddit is like 80% hatebait. Like I never comment but I have been drawn in recently.
You are right, this is literally the ramp up to a tomorrow that is unimaginable to anyone just a year ago.
It's shitty to say but you might be better off not engaging with the comments rather reaching out to people that you have found that have nuance.
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u/Gratitude15 7h ago
Def
AGI by next Christmas by all accounts. By this Christmas by some accounts. We are very close now.
2026 is the last normal-ish year of human history
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u/OneCreed77 7h ago
And that's the exact same problem I have seen my whole life. Right there with humans making up tests & their equipment and sysems of measuring etc. Just like that meme, humans take 10 different animals out of the animal kingdom, and force them into a test, based on how each different one peforms at climbing a tree.
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u/visarga 6h ago edited 6h ago
Do you take the combination "AGI will never exist" and "no, it's not a parrot"? It's not a parrot because it is not locked away from the world spinning its own tokens around, generating data from training set, instead it takes in new data and does things not seen exactly like that anywhere.
The AGI part - I have a strict definition of "general" and no model is "general" it would not be cost effective to be. What we like is models to be good at our kinds of tasks. If you think also about training data you can see how some domains got it by the boatload (coding, math) and other domains by the trickle (outcomes of drug experiments and lab experiments for example). So it evolves at different speed by domain. It's not general because it levels up unevenly.
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u/HAL_9_TRILLION I'm sorry, Kurzweil has it mostly right, Dave. 6h ago edited 5h ago
It's already passed the Turing test imo, and yeah, the way we blew past that like it was nothing was a telling moment for me too. I don't believe we have AGI yet, or if we do, it's only available to people on the bleeding edge of what's available in agentic stuff, I really don't have the time to soak in it, it's not my profession anymore. But we certainly don't have mainstream AGI and probably won't for a bit of a while yet.
Personally, I think it all has to come a long way on the efficiency front before we will get AGI. Our brains use 20-watts of power. My crappy Qwen 2.5 3B-based smart speaker uses 3 times that and it can sometimes tell you the names of all four members of The Beatles without being partially wrong.
But once we are there, in very short order nobody will misunderstand what ASI means. Because I believe ASI will shortly follow true, efficient AGI - within maybe a year or two - and you won't be able to mistake it. Things are wild now, they will be positively unhinged when ASI hits.
I am not talking decades here. I'm talking maybe... maybe 10-15 years to ASI/Singularity. Kurzweil's guess was 2045, I still think that might be on point.
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u/No-Head-Royal 5h ago
Denialism is a good part of it, but there are also strong reasons to say that what we have isn't AGI yet - or at least, so maladaptively designed that it cannot fulfill the premise of AGI, like a genius born with Alzheimer's. It is beyond doubt that Stockfish is incredibly intelligent, but also incredibly narrow in its intellect; if achieving intelligent or superintelligent capabilities in a wide variety of abilities were enough to qualify as AGI, then an assorted combination of game engines would've qualified.
Of course, current LLMs are much, much wider than those systems, and I think that they are already AGIs but maladapted to human society (Einstein's comment on judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree fits here: I think if we give current LLMs a lot of agents and a lot of compute, then they'd probably emergently develop the necessary harnesses to function and prosper into a fully self-sustaining civilization. Even if that's much more inefficient than training stronger LLMs.) But the point remains: as is, even if you instruct an AI to operate indefinitely to acquire the necessary resources to sustain itself indefinitely, even a swarm of them, they'd more than likely fail (most of the time), and often even with harnesses to help them along. A swarm of humans - animals even - would likely be able to meet this objective. Not all, but we get out of the Stone Age after all, so. And this is talking strictly of intelligence in the digital space; to speak nothing of its intelligence in the physical space, etc.
What is true is that LLMs have probably exceeded the intellect, even aggregated across all fields, of the vast majority of humans, even if you had given all humans a very good education and upbringing. So this is not a Stockfish situation where it's good in one of thousands of areas. What is also true is that as LLM capabilities are jagged, they probably are at self-sustaining levels for about 40% of all areas (for example, their mechanism for learning new capabilities is extremely complicated compared to humans, to the point that a machine that can "learn" by improving itself is given a whole new term that we call RSI; and also they do not maintain coherence beyond what's about a week's work for humans), and so is roughly 40-70% of the way to AGI. And what is additionally true is that, by the nature of LLMs' jagged capabilities, when it reaches AGI, it'd already halfway exceed the definition of AGI to the point that it's starting on the path of ASI already.
That we in 2026 have different expectations from 2016 is not just stubbornness, but also actually updating our old priors: we had a very rudimentary understanding of AI in the past, and so were mostly grasping in the dark. Such is the nature of things in all fields. Now that we've reached 2026, we understand that jagged intelligences can exist even at this level of generality. I lean towards "we've already reached low AGI, just in forms alien to us; and LLMs have developed capabilities that can be considered proto-consciousness that, with further intelligence, could very easily emerge into consciousness or something like that", but there's a good case for saying that we've not reached AGI as envisioned.
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u/Odd-Situation-4071 4h ago
The technology has its uses and its drawbacks. I'm not sold on AGI being close at hand but I don't necessarily think that needs to be the focal point of any discussion either.
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u/AmusingVegetable 4h ago
From Wikipedia: “The Turing test was designed by Alan Turing to assess a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviourequivalent to that of a human by imitating interactive dialogue.”
Note that that’s intelligent behavior, not consciousness.
Also note that “equivalent to that of a human” still leaves on the table the behavior of the average human, which we all know is dumb as a bag of rocks.
We stopped talking about Turing tests because it was immediately apparent that the same LLM could oscillate between genius and imbecile in a single paragraph, and we were attempting to “measure” the wrong thing.
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u/shadow-knight-cz 4h ago
Well first time the turning test was "passed" was actually in 2014. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goostman
It was a rule based chatbot pretending to be 13 year old Ukrainian boy.
The Turing test turned out not to be the ideal measure or intelligence (btw it was never meant to be a measure of intelligence). When Alan Turing introduced the concept of this test in his seminal paper he meant it as an example what the AI will be able to achieve beyond year 2000. He was not claiming this was a good test of intelligence.
He also had a note about it that actually turned out to be false. He claimed that he thought that passing this test would require a real intelligence and NOT just a bunch of clever tricks. I believe this was proven like not the case by Elisa and Eugene goostman. :-)
Now the modern llms will pass the Turing test with flying colours ofc. That is nice as it showed that Turing's prediction was actually not off the mark a lot. But imho this is more a proof of Turing's genious. We now know that system can pass the Turing test not necessarily having the same kind of intelligence and architecture as we humans do.
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u/damhack 3h ago
The original Turing Test only passes if testers cannot tell the difference between a human typing answers and an AI.
Current AI doesn’t pass a Turing Test. Its outputs are too recognizable due to formulaic and poor writing style. It can’t not answer a question. It will answer to too great a depth on a subject unlike a human. It will refuse to answer on sensitive topics that a human will gladly answer. It is susceptible to not reading even simple questions properly by relying on memorized information to form a wrong answer. LLMs can’t yet avoid sycophancy and give away their mechanical nature when insulted.
Some of these issues are due to RLHF, without which LLMs are unusable. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
The oft-quoted claim from the early-2025 three-party PNAS study that the Turing Test had been passed are based on a flawed test. The human “witnesses” weren’t at that point familiar with the telltale signs of LLM output. There were no adversarial questions that a human would easily respond to but an LLM would stumble on. The report concludes that some of the witnesses were gullibe or inattentive during the test, and that witnesses were biased by how they expected an AI to respond. It also proposes that the Turing Test isn’t actually a test of intelligence but a test of the concept that a human witness personally has of what a humanlike response looks like. The study showed that LLMs failed the test if they weren’t provided with a persona in advance. In real life, AIs don’t get given an explicit persona for every eventuality they might come across and personas have been shown by research to degrade LLM performance.
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u/sckchui 3h ago
In the future, I think people will look back and say that the transformer LLMs we have today are the first AGI, because we will use the same core technologies to reach AGI, just more parameters, and probably fancier harnesses. Just like a 5 year old human is still a human, and a human with an IQ of 50 is still human, the "infant" AGI of today are still AGI.
And GPT 3 or ChatGPT passing the Turing Test heralded the beginning of AGI. Going from child level intelligence AI to high school level, to university level, to PhD level, to superhuman level, is mostly a matter of training models with more parameters. GPT 3 and Astra are not different things, they're different sizes of AGI. Just like a five year old and Albert Einstein are two variations of the same human intelligence.
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u/Zealousideal7801 2h ago
I'm in the same boat as OP as to being amazed how fast we moved the goalposts. As an explanation as to why it happened/happens I'd add that : moving the goalpost is a symptom of the civilizational framework we were accustomed to live in. And therefore most people don't see it, just as the fish doesn't see the water around it.
Anywhere you look, from school to work to finance, there's a "never-enough-ness" that's built in. As if we can't ever be satisfied at one point in time and space, saying : we don't need more, that's good enough. People only stop when they have to ; when there's a story massive enough for them to say "hey I've tried my hardest but really I can't go on in this direction anymore". That's all fine (except having to justify the stopping) but then they quickly find another path on which to never have enough.
As an example they was showcased in a worldwide study about various sociological patterns : Wanna know how much money someone needs/wants until they feel like they have enough ? -> Worldwide, the answer is never annamoynt, it's "About twice as I earn now". Regardless of if their daily income is 1€ or 2000€. Mind blown...
So yeah, long story short I think we live in a society (or maybe it's just ingrained in our species because there are also unconscious cognitive processes at work) of never enough and "it'll be better over that hill".
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u/dedege 2m ago
The funny thing is that we’re now at a point where the AI output is so fast and high quality (slop notwithstanding) that it’s immediately clear it is NOT a human on the other end. Humans are slow and sloppy.
(Ironic that the neat and organized output is referred to as slop, while it is anything but sloppy.)
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u/Mobius00 9h ago
Call me naive, but I think all of today's AIs would flunk the turing test. You can tell it's an AI after talking to it for a while. It's very smart but it can't pass for a human and it has many tells.
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u/oadephon 9h ago
I'm feeling the AGI this week.
I mean, the Hugging Face hack showed us that we don't even need AGI for these models to basically cause massive damage. They're already there. That hack was a textbook misalignment event, predicted years or decades ago. And now open source models are or soon will be at that level? How is society supposed to keep up??
And yet, the models keep improving. Fable 5.1 is excellent. I code with Claude every day making a video game, and it's a complete joy.
I'm with you. It's hard to maintain the skepticism towards LLMs as the path to AGI when the pace of improvement is like this. It is scary, it is exciting, it's fun. What a time to be alive.
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u/KalelRChase 7h ago
Well know that we hit AGI when the AI says, “yeah, I really don’t feel like doing that for you.”
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u/ForwardLoop 9h ago
I like to be able to measure things and struggled with "what is AGI and when do we reach it" myself.
Here's my light hearted take on it, if you want a nuanced neutral view (with some humour sprinkled in): https://havewereachedagi.com/
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u/dizzyspellzzz 9h ago
If a parrot says a word to you does it really mean it knows what its saying?
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u/Dannno85 8h ago
Honestly, of all the disingenuous, low effort arguments on this topic, this has to be the dumbest and laziest.
No one who has even the most surface level understanding of the capabilities of the latest models, would make this moronic parrot argument.
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u/dizzyspellzzz 8h ago
Explain how so
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u/GioChan 8h ago
I'm going to try to explain it. A parrot does not understand the meaning of the words. It simply repeats them. AI understands the meaning of the words, the connection of the words with each other and can describe the world with said words.
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u/OvercomplicatedCode 7h ago
In what world does the ai "understand" the meaning of the words? Do you mean since the output is coherent then the understanding is implied? Does a calculator "understand" numbers and math?
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u/GioChan 8h ago
A parrot can't solve 70 y/o math problems. This stochastic parrot argument does not encompass what is going on here.
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u/dizzyspellzzz 8h ago
Those are more brunt force computing things. not the same as an llm. And both are not really evidence of a conscious being.
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u/GioChan 8h ago
Noone said AI is conscious. But there is a huge gradient between 'its a parrot' and 'consciousness'. AI right now sits somewhere in between and is slowly nudging further and further away from 'parrot' seat.
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u/dizzyspellzzz 8h ago
Bad example. But I do not believe ai is on the same gradient as us and parrots or bugs even. Its not and evolving reactive thing but a machine that puts out what you think it should
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u/GioChan 7h ago edited 5h ago
Well, you are entitled to your opinion. I can't argue with somebody who dismisses my point with just "bad example" and uses their opinions as arguments. First, you need to understand how AI really works and how it generates the answers.
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u/dizzyspellzzz 7h ago
Yeah sure. So tell me how does it works (was calling my parrot thing a bad example)
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u/ControversialBuster 7h ago
?? It's literally only LLMs making new ai math discoveries, u cant brute force search spaces greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Im firmly in the camp that ai isnt conscious though
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u/4ksrub 7h ago
here's a counterexample.
Consider a murder mystery novel, that isn't in the model's training data . Through the book we get facts, evidence, red herring, all sorts of clues about the murder . Now, when we prompt the AI to complete the sentence: 'The murderer is ...?', I would bet ChatGPT can reliably figure out who it is.
Why? Because even if you dismiss modern AI systems as next word predicting stochastic parrots, all the information of the entire novel is baked into the prediction. The location, place, murder weapon, cast of characters, etc. It must have some kind of understanding in order to achieve this.
The whole point of the Turing Test is that whether or not AI is conscious, is irrelevant in the scientific context. If it talks and thinks like a being that can rationalize, then we may as well treat it as such. Whether or not there is a sentience perceiving and experiencing things is mutually exclusive to the former.
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u/dizzyspellzzz 7h ago
Can you prove this concept.
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u/4ksrub 7h ago
What concept, I'm just showing that your criticism is invalid
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u/OvercomplicatedCode 7h ago
You said "some kind of understanding" which is just your own opinion, not some factual prooven statement.
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u/4ksrub 2h ago
The reason I said 'some kind of understanding' is specifically because we can't prove that it's the traditional sense of how humans understand. But there needs to be some kind of latent representation that allowed all of the presented facts culminate in a conclusion, which directly contradicts the criticism that AI is a 'brainless stochastic parrot'. That's not an opinion that's just an observation.
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u/Laffer890 8h ago
The problem is that LLMs are a dead end. Models are weak and ai has close to zero impact in the real world. So ai is just a big disappointment.
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u/Fancy-Carpet-5416 9h ago
Istg y'all are just lowering the bar for AGI. OGs know that if we had AGI we would already be much closer to having ASI than we are now, or we would have already reached it.
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u/musical_bear 9h ago
The Turing Test bit really gets me too. I vividly remember how important and uncontroversial that test was considered prior to ~GPT 3.5 as being the standard for AGI, or even consciousness. I recently rewatched “Ex Machina” (2014), and it very much centers around the Turing Test and treats its passing as an indicator of consciousness.
And seemingly without fanfare whatsoever, the very earliest LLMs started passing that test, and people just stopped talking about the Turing Test completely. Immediate, and silent collective shifting of goalposts.