1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI
Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.
To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI.
No really.
You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today.
But, really, what else do you want out of the bots? Flying cars, cancer cures, frozen irradiated Mars bunkers? We were mostly getting there already. It'll speed thing up a bit, sure, but mostly just because we can't be arsed to actually fund research anymore. The bots are just making things cheaper, maybe.
No, be real. We wanted cold hard cash out of them. And even those crummy catfish bots back in 2015 were doing the job well enough.
We can debate 'intelligence' until the sun dies out and will still never be satisfied.
But the reality is that we want money, and if you take that low, terrible, and venal standard as the passing bar, then we've been here for a decade.
(oh man, just read that back, I think I need to take a day off here, youch!)
He's_Outta_Line_But_He's_Right.gif
Seriously, AGI to the HN crowd is not the same as AGI to the average human. To my parents, these bots must look like fucking magic. They can converse with them, "learn" new things, talk to a computer like they'd talk to a person and get a response back. Then again, these are also people who rely on me for basic technology troubleshooting stuff, so I know that most of this stuff is magic to their eyes.
That's the problem, as you point out. We're debating a nebulous concept ("intelligence") that's been co-opted by marketers to pump and dump the latest fad tech that's yet to really display significant ROI to anyone except the hypesters and boosters, and isn't rooted in medical, psychological, or societal understanding of the term anymore. A plurality of people are ascribing "intelligence" to spicy autocorrect, worshiping stochastic parrots vomiting markov chains but now with larger context windows and GPUs to crunch larger matrices, powered by fossil fuels and cooled by dwindling freshwater supplies, and trained on the sum total output of humanity but without compensation to anyone who actually made the shit in the first place.
So yeah. You're dead-on. It's just about bilking folks out of more money they already don't have.
And Ashley Madison could already to that for pennies on the dollar compared to LLMs. They just couldn't "write code" well enough to "replace" software devs.
So does a drone show to an uncontacted tribe. So does a card trick to a chimpanzee (there are videos of them freaking out when a card disappears).
That's not an argument for or against anything.
I propose this:
"AGI is a self-optimizing artificial organism that can solve 99% of all the humanity's problems."
See, it's not a bad definition IMO. Find me one NS-5 from the "I, Robot" movie that also has access to all science and all internet and all history and can network with the others and fix our cities, nature, manufacturing, social issues and a few others, just in a decade or two. Then we have AGI.
Comparing to what was there 10 years ago and patting ourselves on the back about how far we have gotten is being complacent.
Let's never be complacent.
FYI, the reactions in those videos is most likely not to a cool magic trick, but rather a response to an observed threat. Could be the person filming/performing smiling (showing teeth), or someone behind the camera purposely startling it at the "right" moment.
Plus it's a massive prediction machine trained on a corpus of the bulk of human knowledge.
Feels weird to see it minimized in that way.