> 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.

Turing himself argued that trying to measure if a computer is intelligent is a fool's errand because it is so difficult to pin down definitions. He proposed what we call the "Turing test" as a knowable, measurable alternative. The first paragraph of his paper reads:

> I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin > with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The > definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use > of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words > "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used > it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the > question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as > a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I > shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is > expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

Many people who want to argue about AGI and its relation to the Turing test would do well to read Turing's own arguments.

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 don't think so... I think most of the sci-fi I grew up reading presented AGI that could reason better than humans could, like make a plan and carry it out.

Like do people not know what word "general" means? It means not limited to any subset of capabilities -- so that means it can teach itself to do anything that can be learned. Like start a business. AI today can't really learn from its experiences at all.

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.

The Turing test pits a human against a machine, each trying to convince a human questioner that the other is the machine. If the machine knows how humans generally behave, for a proper test, the human contestant should know how the machine behaves. I think that this YouTube channel clearly shows that none of today's models pass the Turing test: https://www.youtube.com/@FatherPhi

> Maybe we need to start thinking less about building tests for definitively calling an LLM AGI and instead deciding when we can't tell humans aren't LLMs for declaring AGI is here.

If you've never read the original paper [1] I recommend that you do so. We're long past the point of some human can't determine if X was done by man or machine.

[1]: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf

People thought Eliza was alive too in the 60s. AGI is not determined by how ignorant, uninformed humans view a technology they don't understand. That is the single dumbest criterion you could come up with for defining it.

Regarding shifting goalposts, you are suggesting the goalposts are being moved further away, but it's the exact opposite. The goalposts are being moved closer and closer. Someone from the 50s would have had the expectation that artificial intelligence ise something recognisable as essentially equivalent to human intelligence, just in a machine. Artificial intelligence in old sci-fi looked nothing like Claude Code. The definition has since been watered down again and again and again and again so that anything and everything a computer does is artificial intelligence. We might as well call a calculator AGI at this point.

The goal post keeps moving because LLM hypeists keep saying LLMs are "close" to AGI (or even are, already). Any reasonably intelligent individual that knows anything about LLMs obviously rejects those claims, but the rest of the world doesn't.

An AGI would not have problems reading an analog clock. Or rather, it would not have a problem realizing it had a problem reading it, and would try to learn how to do it.

An AGI is not whatever (sophisticated) statistical model is hot this week.

Just my take.

Maybe moving the goalposts is how we find the definition?

Sure, in the 80s after interacting with CC 1 time you would call it 'alive'. After having interacted with it for 5-10 minutes you would clearly see that it is as far from AGI as something more mundane as C compiler is.

By that measure Eliza might pass the turing test too. It just shows it's far from being a though-terminating argument by itself.

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.

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.

Please reveal the “scientific” definition of AGI.

I bet they were laughing their asses off when they came up with that. This is nonsensical.

> 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?

It's not one-shot. Other people had attempted the same problem w/ the same AI & failed. You're confused about terms so you redefine them to make your version of the fairy tale real.

Talk to a doctor? In this economy? I've got ChatGPT to talk to. Wait hang on.

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

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.

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> 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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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?

> And if you look at Boston Dynamics, Unitree and Generalist's progress on robotics

Their progress is almost nought. Humanoids are stupid creations that are not good at anything in the real world. I'll give it to the machine dogs, at least they can reach corners we cannot.

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.

> Progress is huge and fast

is it? we're currently scaled on data input and LLMs in general, the only thing making them advance at all right now is adding processing power

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