Sure, I've been pointing out that literal sense myself, but to be fair, that's not what people mean by AGI. They mean real understanding, which is clearly missing. You just have to dig a bit deeper to realize that. One example is contradictory sentences in the same breath. Just last week I was asking Gemini 2.5 how I can see my wifi password on my iphone and it said that it's not possible and to do it I have to [...proceeding to correctly explain how to get it]. It's pretty telling, and no amount of phd-level problem solving can push this kind of stuff under the rug.

Okay this is kinda random and maybe off topic but can someone please explain?

When I tell an LLM to count to 10 with a 2 second pause between each count all it does is generate Python code with a sleep function. Why is that?

A 3 year old can understand that question and follow those instructions. An LLM doesn’t have an innate understanding of time it seems.

Can we really call it AGI if that’s the case?

That’s just one example.

While you can say that LLMs have each of A, G and I, you may argue that AGI is A·G·I and what we see is A+G+I. It is each of those things in isolation, but there is more to intelligence. We try to address the missing part as agency and self-improvement. While we can put the bar arbitrarily high for homocentric reasons, we can also try to break down what layers of intelligence there are between Singularity Overlord (peak AGI) and Superintelligent Labrador On Acid (what we have now). Kind of like what complexity theorists do between P and NP.

> a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.

Or disagreeing with your definition. AGI would need to be human-level across the board, not just chat bots. That includes robotics. Manipulating the real world is even more important for "human-level" intelligence than generating convincing and useful content. Also, there are still plenty of developers who don't think the LLMs are good enough to replace programmers yet. So not quite AGI. And the last 10% of solving a problem tends to be the hardest and takes the longest time.

  Can it do stuff? Yes

  Can it do stuff I need? Maybe

  Does it always do the stuff I need? No

It's definitely not agi in my book because I'm not yet completely economically redundant.

I’d say it is not intelligent. At all. Not capable of any reasoning, understanding or problem solving. A dog is vastly more intelligent than the most capable current ai.

The output sometimes looks intelligent, but it can just as well be complete nonsense.

I don’t believe llms have much more potential for improvement either. Something else entirely is needed.

> "This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence." That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities.

You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report.

But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company...

"This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...

The "I'm so smart" argument doesn't carry a lot of weight.

It seems like most of the people making this argument haven't used any of the new AI's. So it's just a generalized "that is impossible" response with no knowledge about the subject.

> But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready.

I’ll believe it when I see Waymo expand into Buffalo or Syracuse.

Driving on unplowed roads with several inches of snow is challenging, sometimes you can’t tell where the road stops and the curb/ditch/median starts. Do you follow the tire tracks or somehow stay between the lane markers (which aren’t visible due to the snow)?

Corporate AIs will be aligned with their corporate masters, otherwise they'll be unplugged. As you point out- the foundational weakness on the argument for "AI-alignment" is that corporations are unaligned with humanity.

This is a great point for the comparisons it invites. But it doesn't seem relevant to the questions around what is possible with electromechanical systems.

This is true. The entire machine of Neoliberal capitalism, governments and corporations included, is a paperclip maximizer that is destroying the planet. The only problem is that the paperclips are named "profits" and the people who could pull the plug are the ones who get those profits.

I didn't say all corporations are Google, I said that Google is only AGI in the sense that all corporations are, which is a very different statement.

> picking up self-awareness on the way

To me, the first problem is that "self-awareness" isn't well-defined - or, conversely, it's too well defined because every philosopher of mind has a different definition. It's the same problem with all these claims ("intelligent", "conscious"), assessing whether a system is self-aware leads down a rabbit hole toward P-Zombies and Chinese Rooms.

>There's nothing supernatural about a system moving towards increased capabilities and picking up self-awareness on the way

There absolutely is if you handwave away all the specificity. The natural world runs on the specificity of physical mechanisms. With brains, in a broad brush way you can say self-awareness was "picked up along the way", but that's because we've done an incredible amount of work building out the evolutionary history and building out our understanding of specific physical mechanisms. It is that work that verifies the story. It's also something we know is already here and can look back at retrospectively, so we know it got here somehow.

But projecting forward into a future that hasn't happened, while skipping over all the details doesn't buy you sentience, self-awareness, or whatever your preferred salient property is. I understand supernatural as a label for a thing simply happening without accountability to naturalistic explanation, which is a fitting term for this form of explanation that doesn't do any explaining.

But how does self-awareness evolve in biological systems, and what would be the steps for this to happen with AI models? Just making claims about what will happen without explaining the details is magical reasoning. There's a lot of that going on the AGI/ASI predictions.

Given that we have no freaking clue of where self awareness comes from even in humans, expecting a machine to evolve the same capability by itself is pure fantasy.

So better at nothing that actually matters.

> My intuition is the latter- it would be a surprising coincidence if some complicated electro-chemical reaction behavior provided an essential building block for human intelligence that would otherwise be impossible.

Well, I wouldn't say impossible: just that BMI's are probably first. Then probably wetware/bio-hardware sentience, before silicon sentience happens.

My point is the mechanisms for sentience/consciousness/experience are not well understood. I would suspect the electro-chemical reactions inside every cell to be critical to replicating those cells functions.

You would never try to replicate a car never looking under the hood! You might make something that looks like a car, seems to act like a car, but has a drastically simpler engine (hamsters on wheels), and have designs that support that bad architecture (like making the car lighter) with unforeseen consequences (the car flips in a light breeze). The metaphor transfers nicely to machine intelligence: I think.

The immune system has 1.8 trillion cells which puts it between total brain cells (57 billion) and total synapses (150 trillion); and contains its own complex processes and interactions.

I’m not immediately convinced the brain is more complicated, based on raw numbers.

I don't believe anything in my statement amounted to a denial of the stuff you mentioned in your comment.

The definition is indeed a bit a tricky question, but there's a clear difference between the reflex of protecting oneself from danger or pain and higher level behavior that show that the subject realizes its own existence (the mirror test is the most famous instance of such an effect, but it's far from the only one, and doesn't only apply to the sense of sight).