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I don't think AGI is right around the corner

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336 points mooreds | 4 comments | 06 Jul 25 20:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.801s | source
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raspasov ◴[06 Jul 25 23:54 UTC] No.44485275[source]▶
Anyone who claims that a poorly definined concept, AGI, is right around the corner is most likely:

- trying to sell something

- high on their own stories

- high on exogenous compounds

- all of the above

LLMs are good at language. They are OK summarizers of text by design but not good at logic. Very poor at spatial reasoning and as a result poor at connecting concepts together.

Just ask any of the crown jewel LLM models "What's the biggest unsolved problem in the [insert any] field".

The usual result is a pop-science-level article but with ton of subtle yet critical mistakes! Even worse, the answer sounds profound on the surface. In reality, it's just crap.

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1. timmg ◴[07 Jul 25 00:29 UTC] No.44485480[source]▶
Interesting. I think the key to what you wrote is "poorly definined".

I find LLMs to be generally intelligent. So I feel like "we are already there" -- by some definition of AGI. At least how I think of it.

Maybe a lot of people think of AGI as "superhuman". And by that definition, we are not there -- and may not get there.

But, for me, we are already at the era of AGI.

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2. Incipient ◴[07 Jul 25 00:43 UTC] No.44485559[source]▶
I would call them "generally applicable". "intelligence" definitely implies leaning - and I'm not sure RAG, fine-tuning, or 6monthly updates counts - to split hairs.

Where I will say we have a massive gap, which makes the average person not consider it AGI, is in context. I can give a person my very modest codebase, and ask for a change, and they'll deliver - mostly coherently - to that style, files in the right place etc. Still to today with AI, I get inconsistent design, files in random spots, etc.

3. apsurd ◴[07 Jul 25 00:43 UTC] No.44485562[source]▶
that's the thing about language. we all kinda gotta agree on the meanings
4. weatherlite ◴[07 Jul 25 12:07 UTC] No.44489492[source]▶
> I find LLMs to be generally intelligent. So I feel like "we are already there" -- by some definition of AGI. At least how I think of it.

I don't disagree - they are useful in many cases and exhibit human like (or better) performance in many tasks. However they cannot simply be a "drop in white collar worker" yet, they are too jagged and unreliable, don't have a real memory etc. Their economic impact is still very much limited. I think this is what many people mean when they say AGI - something with a cognitive performance so good it equals or beats humans in the real world, at their jobs - not at some benchmark.

One could ask - does it matter ? Why can't we say the current tools are great task solvers and call it AGI even if they are bad agents? It's a lengthy discussion to have but I think that ultimately yes, agentic reliability really matters.