I don't think AGI is right around the corner

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.

Alright, let’s get this straight.

You’ve got people foaming at the mouth anytime someone mentions AGI, like it’s some kind of cult prophecy. “Oh it’s poorly defined, it’s not around the corner, everyone talking about it is selling snake oil.” Give me a break. You don’t need a perfect definition to recognize that something big is happening. You just need eyes, ears, and a functioning brain stem.

Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension.

And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is.

And don’t give me that “it sounds profound but it’s really just crap” line. That’s 90 percent of academia. That’s every selfhelp book, every political speech, every guy with a podcast and a ring light. If sounding smarter than you while being wrong disqualifies a thing, then we better shut down half the planet.

Look, you’re not mad because it’s dumb. You’re mad because it’s not that dumb. It’s close. Close enough to feel threatening. Close enough to replace people who’ve been coasting on sounding smart instead of actually being smart. That’s what this is really about. Ego. Fear. Control.

So yeah, maybe it’s not AGI yet. But it’s smarter than the guy next to you at work. And he’s got a pension.

Something big is definitely happening but it's not the intelligence explosion utopia that the AI companies are promising.

> Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension

My experience with LLMs have been all over the place. They're insanely good at comprehending language. As a side effect, they're also decent at comprehending complicated concepts like math or programming since most of human knowledge is embedded in language. This does not mean they have a thorough understanding of those concepts. It is very easy to trip them up. They also fail in ways that are not obvious to people who aren't experts on whatever is the subject of its output.

> And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is.

I feel like this is handwaving away the shortcomings a bit too much. It does not screw up in the same way humans do. Not even close. Besides, I think computers should rightfully be held up to a higher standard. We already have programs that can automate tasks that human brains would find challenging and tedious to do. Surely the next frontier is something with the speed and accuracy of a computer while also having the adaptability of human reasoning.

I don't feel threatened by LLMs. I definitely feel threatened by some of the absurd amount of money being put into them though. I think most of us here will be feeling some pain if a correction happens.

You say LLMs are “insanely good” at comprehending language, but then immediately pull back like it’s some kind of fluke. “Well yeah, it looks like it understands, but it doesn’t really understand.” What does that even mean? Do you think your average person walking around fully understands everything they say? Half of the people you know are just repeating crap they heard from someone else. You ask them to explain it and they fold like a cheap tent. But we still count them as sentient.

Then you say it’s easy to trip them up. Of course it is. You know what else is easy to trip up? People. Ask someone to do long division without a calculator. Ask a junior dev to write a recursive function that doesn’t melt the stack. Mistakes aren’t proof of stupidity. They’re proof of limits. And everything has limits. LLMs don’t need to be flawless. They need to be better than the tool they’re replacing. And in a lot of cases, they already are.

Now this part: “computers should be held to a higher standard.” Why? Says who? If your standard is perfection, then nothing makes the cut. Not the car, not your phone, not your microwave. We use tools because they’re better than doing it by hand, not because they’re infallible gods of logic. You want perfection? Go yell at the compiler, not the language model.

And then, this one really gets me, you say “surely the next frontier is a computer with the accuracy of a machine and the reasoning of a human.” No kidding. That’s the whole point. That’s literally the road we’re on. But instead of acknowledging that we’re halfway there, you’re throwing a tantrum because we didn’t teleport straight to the finish line. It’s like yelling at the Wright brothers because their plane couldn’t fly to Paris.

As for the money... of course there's a flood of it. That’s how innovation happens. Capital flows to power. If you’re worried about a correction, fine. But don’t confuse financial hype with technical stagnation. The tools are getting better. Fast. Whether the market overheats is a separate issue.

You say you're not threatened by LLMs. That’s cute. You’re writing paragraphs trying to prove why they’re not that smart while admitting they’re already better at language than most people. If you’re not threatened, you’re sure spending a lot of energy trying to make sure nobody else is impressed either.

Look, you don’t have to worship the thing. But pretending it's just a fancy parrot with a glitchy brain is getting old. It’s smart. It’s flawed. It’s changing everything. Deal with it.