If 2023 ends up giving us AGI, room-temperature superconductors, Starships and a cure for cancer, I think we will able to call it a good year...
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Okay, ChatGPT is only text-to-text, but Google & Co are adding more modalities now, including images, audio and robotics. I think one missing step is to fuse training and inference regime into one, just as in animals. That probably requires something else than the usual transformer-based token predictors.
AGI was the result of people using the older term "AI" for things that hadn't turned out to be what we thought AI was going to be.
Like alot of technology terms, all of this has its orgins in science fiction, when AI was supposed to be the equivalent of a human mind, but constructed out of something other than meat. The AI would have agency, it would do things... and do them because it wanted to. It would have goals, that it might fail or succeed at. And it would learn... a proper AI might be constructed to know nothing about a particular subject, but it could then go on to learn (on its own without any outside help) all about that topic. Perhaps even to the point of conducting its own original research to learn more. A sufficiently intelligent AI would go on to learn things no human had ever learned, to invent and theorize inventions and theories no human had conceived of.
But then we all realized that intelligence might be severable from those other parts, and we might have an "oracle" that when asked questions could provide sensible answers, but would have no agency. That wouldn't be able to learn in any real way, but since it already knew the sensible answers, that didn't matter.
And at that point, you see AGI start being used. And I assumed it meant "well, that is what we'll call Asimov's robots, or Skynet, or whatever".
Except, here you are again using AGI to mean the dumb oracles that aren't intelligent in any meaningful way.
Like, wtf.