Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

The truth is, we have had AGI for years now. We even have artificial super intelligence - we have software systems that are more intelligent than any human. Some humans might have an extremely narrow subject that they are more intelligent than any AI system, but the people on that list are vanishing small.

AI hasn't met sci-fi expectations, and that's a marketing opportunity. That's all it is.

I don't think the goalpost has been shifted for AGI or the definition of AGI that is used by these corporations. It's just they broke it down to stages to claim AGI achieved. It was always a model or system that surpasses human capabilities at most tasks/being able to replace a human worker. The big companies broke it down to AGI stage 1, stage 2, etc to be able to say they achieved AGI.

The Turing Test/Imitation Game is not a good benchmark for AGI. It is a linguistics test only. Many chatbots even before LLMs can pass the Turing Test to a certain degree.

Regardless, the goalpost hasn't shifted. Replacing human workforce is the ultimate end goal. That's why there's investors. The investors are not pouring billions to pass the Turing Test.

> I think we keep changing the goalposts on AGI

Isn't that exactly what you would expect to happen as we learn more about the nature and inner workings of intelligence and refine our expectations?

There's no reason to rest our case with the Turing test.

I hear the "shifting goalposts" riposte a lot, but then it would be very unexciting to freeze our ambitions.

At least in an academic sense, what LLMs aren't is just as interesting as what they are.

It's not a great definition but it's also not a terrible one either. For an AI system to be able to do all or even most of the jobs in an economy it has to be well rounded in a way it still isn't today, meaning: reliability, planning, long term memory, physical world manipulation etc. A system that can do all of that well enough so it can do the jobs of doctors, programmers and plumbers is generally intelligent in my view.

> They redefined AGI to be an economical thing

Huh. Source? I mean, typical OpenAI bullshit, but would love to know how they defined it.

Please reveal the “scientific” definition of AGI.

It makes sense though. Humans are coherent to the economy based on their ability to perform useful work. If an AI system can perform work as well as or better than any human, than with respect to "anything any human has ever been willing to pay for", it is AGI.

I don't get why HN commenters find this so hard to understand. I have a sense they are being deliberately obtuse because they resent OpenAI's success.

I could easily make that graph a reality and sustain that pace for a couple years, considering I'm starting from 0 javelin skill.

> eschatology

From Wikipedia

Eschatology (/ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last' and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of present age, human history, or the world itself.

I'm case anyone else is vocabulary skill checked like me

Progess is generally salami slicing just as escalation in geopolitics. Not a step function.

Russian Invasion - Salami Tactics | Yes Prime Minister

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang

It feels like they have to say/believe it because it's kind of the only thing that can justify the costs being poured into it and the cost it will need to charge eventually (barring major optimizations) to actually make money on users.

This, someone take Silicon Valley's adderal away.

ATH?

What do you mean we were "supposed to have AGI last summer"?

People obviously have really strong opinions on AI and the hype around investments into these companies but it feels like this is giving people a pass on really low quality discourse.

This source [1] from this time last year says even lab leaders most bullish estimate was 2027.

[1]. https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to...

ARM actually built AGI last month. Spoiler: it's a datacenter CPU.

I do not envy the stress the partnerships, strat ops and infra teams must be perpetually dealing with at OpenAI & Anthropic.

> Do the investments make sense if AGI is not less than 10 years away?

They can. If one consolidated the AI industry into a single monopoly, it would probably be profitable. That doesn't mean in its current state it can't succumb to ruionous competition. But the AGI talk seems to be mostly aimed at retail investors and philospher podcasters than institutional capital.

Best way to achieve AGI: Redefine AGI.

The investments don't make sense.

Investors are typically people with surplus money to invest. Progress cannot be made without trial and error. So fleecing of investors for the greater good of humanity is something I shall allow.

Full Self-Driving 2.0

It's always been this way. I remember, speaking of Microsoft, when they came to my school around 2002 or so giving a talk on AI. They very confidently stated that AGI had already been "solved", we know exactly how to do it, only problem is the hardware. But they estimated that would come in about ten years...

You can read the leaked emails from the Musk lawsuit.

At the very least, Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it, even when they were just making a DOTA bot, and not for hype purposes.

I know he's been out of OpenAI for a while, but if his thinking trickled down into the company's culture, which given his role and how long he was there I would say seems likely, I don't think it's all hype.

Grand delusion, perhaps.

He’s a glorified portfolio manager (questionable how good he actually is given the results vs Anthropic and how quickly they closed the valuation gap with far less money invested) + expert hype man to raise money for risky projects.

> Any sufficiently complex LLM is indistinguishable from AGI

Isn't this tautology? We've de facto defined AGI as a "sufficiently complex LLM."

If we take that statement as fact then I don't believe we are even close to an LLM being sufficiently complex enough.

However, I don't think it is even true. LLMs may not even be on the right track to achieving AGI and without starting from scratch down an alternate path it may never happen.

LLMs to me seem like a complicated database lookup. Storage and retrieval of information is just a single piece of intelligence. There must be more to intelligence than a statistical model of the probable next piece of data. Where is the self learning without intervention by a human. Where is the output that wasn't asked for?

At any rate. No amount of hype is going to get me to believe AGI is going to happen soon. I'll believe it when I see it.

Some might be missing the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

It performs at a usable level across a wide range of tasks. I'm not sure about two years ago, but ten years ago we would have called it an AGI. As opposed to "regular AI" where you have to assemble a training set for your specific problem, then train an AI on it before you can get your answers.

Now our idea of what qualifies as AGI has shifted substantially. We keep looking at what we have and decide that that can't possibly be AGI, our definition of AGI must have been wrong

Some people thought SHRDLU was basically AGI after seeing its demo in 1970. The hype around such systems was so strong that Hubert Dreyfus felt the need to write an entire book arguing against this viewpoint (1972 What Computers Can't Do). All this demonstrates is that we need to be careful with various claims about computer intelligence.

If you didn't call GPT 3.5 AGI I do not believe you when you claim you would have called 5.5 AGI.

I agree with this but they don’t. And that’s the the thing, AGI as they refer is much much much more than what we have, and I don’t know if they are going to ever get there and I’m not sure what’s even there at this point and what will justify their investments.

If you present ELIZA to people some will think it is AGI today.

There is a reason so many scams happen with technology. It is too easy to fool people.

GPT 4 was 3 years ago... it's iterative enhancement.

... until you actually, like, use it and find out all the limitations it has.

And I've been told my job (litigation attorney) is about to be replaced for over 3 years now, has yet to come close.

If I'm reading you right, your opinion is essentially: "If building bigger and bigger statistical next word predictors won't lead to artificial general intelligence, we will never see artificial general intelligence"

I don't know, maybe AGI is possible but there's more to intelligence than statistical next word prediction?

Not sure if you're being sincere or sarcastic but some of us have lived through several AI winters now. And the fact that such a phenomenon exists is because of this terrible amount of hype the topic gets whenever any progress is made.

Same thing happened with self-driving cars. Oh and cryptocurrencies.

I believe Anthropic added CC back to the pro plan.

I think you’re right about this deal. But it’s kind of funny to think back and realize that Microsoft actually has just written off multi-billion-dollar deals, several times in fact.

MS put 10B for 50% if I remember correctly. OpenAI is worth many multiples of that.

OpenAI was also threatening to accuse "Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior during their partnership," an "effort [which] could involve seeking federal regulatory review of the terms of the contract for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign" [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-and-microsoft-tensions-ar...

Does this mean Microsoft gets OpenAI's models for "free" without having to pay them a dime until 2032?

And on top of that, OpenAI still has to pay Microsoft a share of their revenue made on AWS/Google/anywhere until 2030?

And Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI, period?

That's a damn good deal for Microsoft. Likely the investment that will keep Microsoft's stock relevant for years.

Does anyone expect azure quality to improve? Has it improved at all in the last 3 years? Does leadership at MS think it needs to improve?

I doubt it

Perhaps they should use OpenAI models to figure out how to rollout IPv6.

I was under the impression that as long as GitHub doesn't support IPv6 it is a sign that they still haven't finished their migration to Azure. Azure supports IPv6 just fine.

Well, you see, they just can't find a checkbox for ipv6 support in the IIS GUI on their ingress servers.

lol GitHub doesn’t run on azure at msft

They still run their own platform.

Their engineers have been working tirelessly to make Sharepoint/Office/Active Directory as terrible as it possibly could be while still technically being functional, while continuing to raise prices on them. I've seen many small business start to chose Google Workspace over them, the cracks have formed and are large enough that they are no longer in a position were every business just go with Office because that's what everyone uses.

I think a stickied comment about this would be due. No idea if it's possible to call in @dang via at-name?

Microsoft didn't sell anything. OpenAI created more shares and sold those to investors, so Microsoft's stake is getting diluted.

And Microsoft only paid $10B for that stake for the most recognizable name brand for AI around the world. They don't need to "hedge their bets" it's already a humongous win.

Why let Altman continue to call the shots and decrease Microsoft's ownership stake and ability to dictate how OpenAI helps Microsoft and not the other way around?

I don’t understand the “record high” point. How did you decide when a “record high” had been reached in a volatile market? Because at $1 the record high might be $2 until it reaches $3 a week or month later. How did you determine where to slice on “record highs”?

Genuine question because I feel like I’m maybe missing something!

It’s not more hype than product, it has found a market (making many billions in revenue), and it’s not valued at trillions. So wrong on all counts.

They haven’t sold anything they’ve been diluted.

It's better than the original, but still off.

"The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy" is objectively wrong–it has been messy for months [1]. Nos. 1 through 3 are fine, though "if they can't keep up with the tech, OpenAI is moving out" parrots OpenAI's party line. No. 4 doesn't make sense–it starts out with "we" referring to OpenAI in the first person but ends by referring to them in the third person "they." No. 5 is reductive when phrased with "just."

It would seem the translator took corporate PR speak and translated it into something between the LinkedIn and short-form blogger dialects.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-and-microsoft-tensions-ar...

Great scene

Except Gemini might end up being far cheaper per token due to the infrastructure advantage

Good for Google Cloud, bad for Gemini = ??? for Google

How is it good for Gemini that it's not available on two out of three major cloud platforms?

Does this mean they will host OpenAI products but not pay them? Or does it mean they are paying them in some other way?

I don't think Microsoft ever had that restriction. They partnered with everyone already.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deepseek-r1-is-now-av...

https://ai.azure.com/

I think it was a lot less restrictive, as far as I understood, the only limit was Microsoft not being allowed to launch competing Microsoft-developed LLMs.

Azure did $75B last quarter.

That article doesn't give a timeframe, but most of these use 10 years as a placeholder. I would also imagine it's not a requirement for them to spend it evenly over the 10 years, so could be back-loaded.

OpenAI is a large customer, but this is not making Azure their personal cluster.

> OpenAI was desperate to dump Microsoft

Yes. Microsoft was "considering legal action against its partner OpenAI and Amazon over a $50 billion deal that could violate its exclusive cloud agreement with the ChatGPT maker" [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-weighs-legal-ac...

> They did not need to go so hard on the hype - Anthropic hasn’t in relative terms and is generating pretty comparable revenues at present

OpenAI bet on consumers; Anthropic on enterprise. That will necessitate a louder marketing strategy for the former.

Also it's about OpenAI going public.