EDIT: There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI".
"AGI" was already a goalpost move from "AI" which has been gobbled up by the marketing machine.
This is current research. The classification of AGI systems is currently being debated by AI researchers.
It's a classification system for AGI, not a redefinition. It's a refinement.
Also there is no universally accepted definition of AGI in the first place.
I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that drives people to make claims like AGI will be here in the next decade. No, we are not getting that.
And what do you think would happen to us humans if such AGI is achieved? People's ability to put food on the table is dependent on their labor exchanged for money. I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone? Absolutely not. Even UBI isn't going to cut it because even with UBI people still want to work as experiments have shown. But with that, there won't be a majority of work especially paper pushing mid level bs like managers on top of managers etc.
If we actually get AGI, you know what would be the smartest thing for such an advanced thing to do? It would probably kill itself because it would come to the conclusion that living is a sin and a futile effort. If you are that smart, nothing motivates you anymore. You will be just a depressed mass for all your life.
That's just how I feel.
The two concepts have historically been inexorably linked in sci-fi, which will likely make the first AGI harder to recognize as AGI if it lacks consciousness, but I'd argue that simple "unconscious AGI" would be the superior technology for current and foreseeable needs. Unconscious AGI can be employed purely as a tool for massive collective human wealth generation; conscious AGI couldn't be used that way without opening a massive ethical can of worms, and on top of that its existence would represent an inherent existential threat.
Conscious AGI could one day be worthwhile as something we give birth to for its own sake, as a spiritual child of humanity that we send off to colonize distant or environmentally hostile planets in our stead, but isn't something I think we'd be prepared to deal with properly in a pre-post-scarcity society.
It isn't inconceivable that current generative AI capabilities might eventually evolve to such a level that they meet a practical bar to be considered unconscious AGI, even if they aren't there yet. For all the flak this tech catches, it's easy to forget that capabilities which we currently consider mundane were science fiction only 2.5 years ago (as far as most of the population was concerned). Maybe SOTA LLMs fit some reasonable definition of "emerging AGI", or maybe they don't, but we've already shifted the goalposts in one direction given how quickly the Turing test became obsolete.
Personally, I think current genAI is probably a fair distance further from meeting a useful definition of AGI than those with a vested interest in it would admit, but also much closer than those with pessimistic views of the consequences of true AGI tech want to believe.
It is not hard to imagine a "cooking robot" as a black box that — given the appropriate ingredients — would cook any dish for you. Press a button, say what you want, and out it comes.
Internally, the machine would need to perform lots of tasks that we usually associate with intelligence, from managing ingredients and planning cooking steps, to fine-grained perception and manipulation of the food as it is cooking. But it would not be conscious in any real way. Order comes in, dish comes out.
Would we use "intelligent" to describe such a machine? Or "magic"?
It isn't close at all.
A machine could be super intelligent at solving real world practical tasks, better than any human, without being conscious.
We don't have a proper definition of consciousness. Consciousness is infinitely more mysterious than measurable intelligence.
The turing test was succesfull. Pre chatGPT, I would not have believed, that will happen so soon.
LLMs ain't AGI, sure. But they might be an essential part and the missing parts maybe already found, just not put together.
And work there will be always plenty. Distributing ressources might require new ways, though.
In particular we redefined the test to make it passable. In Turing's original concept the competent investigator and participants were all actively expected to collude against the machine. The entire point is that even with collusion, the machine would be able to pass. Instead modern takes have paired incompetent investigators alongside participants colluding with the machine, probably in an effort to be part 'of something historic'.
In "both" (probably more, referencing the two most high profile - Eugene and the large LLMs) successes, the interrogators consistently asked pointless questions that had no meaningful chance of providing compelling information - 'How's your day? Do you like psychology? etc' and the participants not only made no effort to make their humanity clear, but often were actively adversarial obviously intentionally answering illogically, inappropriately, or 'computery' to such simple questions. And the tests are typically time constrained by woefully poor typing skills (this the new normal in the smartphone gen?) to the point that you tend to get anywhere from 1-5 interactions of a few words each.
The problem with any metric for something is that it often ends up being gamed to be beaten, and this is a perfect example of that.
And I did not looked into it (I also don'think the test has too much relevance), but fooling the average person sounds plausible by now.
Now sounding plausible is what LLMs are optimized for and not being plausible, still, I would not have thought we get so far so quick 10 years ago. So I am very hesistant about the future.
The very people whose theories about language are now being experimentally verified by LLMs, like Chomsky, have also been discrediting the Turing test as pseudoscientific nonsense since early 1990s.
It's one of those things like the Kardashev scale, or Level 5 autonomous driving, that's extremely easy to define and sounds very cool and scientific, but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever.
Bots, that are now allmost indistinguishable from humans, won't have a practical impact? I am sceptical. And not just because of scammers.
I don't think there has ever been a time in history when work has been equitable and available to everyone.
Of course, that isn't to say that AI can't make it worse then it is now.
Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before
Literally everything that's been invented.
There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI".
ChatGPT can solve problems that it was not explicitly trained to solve, across a vast number of problem domains.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462
The paper is summarized here https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-achievi...
Edit: because if "AGI" doesn't mean that... then what means that and only that!?
Stepping back for a moment - do we actually want something that has agency?
Think about it - the original definition of AGI was basically a machine that can do absolutely anything at a human level of intelligence or better.
That kind of technology wouldn't just appear instantly in a step change. There would be incremental progress. How do you describe the intermediate stages?
What about a machine that can do anything better than the 50th percentile of humans? That would be classified as "Competent AGI", but not "Expert AGI" or ASI.
> fancy search engine/auto completer
That's an extreme oversimplification. By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak. No that's not how deep learning systems work. It's not auto complete..
