“AGI” never made sense to me. It’s a purely marketing term right?

I’ve ignored it thinking it would go away, but it keeps coming up.

I get that consciousness differs from intelligence and that our waking awareness of life is a complete mystery.

Knowledge and thus intelligence however I consider as actively being solved by these large ML models. That is, with the right combination of machinery and know-how, you’ll get it.

But you’d be no nearer to solving consciousness.

Given this thought trajectory - what is AGI supposed to be?

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layer8 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure why you are bringing up consciousness, that’s largely orthogonal to intelligence. AGI is usually taken to mean the capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks, as opposed to being limited to certain kinds of tasks, or to not matching the general level of human intelligence in some respect.

Intelligence, and hence AGI, doesn’t require consciousness or emotions or sentience.

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p1esk 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks

What human intelligence do you mean? Genius? Professional? Educated? Random person? “Dumb” person?

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drdeca 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the distinction between these options probably doesn’t matter alll that much if the threshold you’re using is either “random person” or higher? Maybe bump it up to “random educated person”?

They are still different concepts of course, but I imagine that once one is achieved, the others aren’t far off.

	▲	p1esk 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, but a random educated person will not perform well on vast majority of specialized tasks where professionals operate. A model like Astra probably will beat random educated person performance on majority of specialized tasks. It’s getting close to the level of professionals in many domains, and to genius level on some (e.g. math). I’m just trying to understand the implications of the current frontier model capabilities.

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layer8 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“General”.

	▲	p1esk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, I don’t know what this means when applied to intelligence

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fxd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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meander_water 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The OpenAI charter defines it as:

"highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work"

https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interv...

	▲	fxd 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		So vague it’s useless. We cannot in a declarative sense define what is economically valuable work even now let alone into the future. People take what they can get for pay. Very few individuals can demand a wage. The value of employment is obviously designed around that, not some arbitrary definition of “valuable”. Of course an AI will accept $0/hr, it doesn’t mean it does the job. Anyone who could accurately define the value of work would be wildly successful without having to try. That is not a useful definition for me unfortunately.

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mdp2021 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Knowledge and thus intelligence

How can you conflate the two.

> solving consciousness

We are very much not interested in that. We just need a proper problem solver.

	▲	fxd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Right, you are interested in “AGI” and presuming none of that requires consciousness right? For example, how do you know that “feeling pain” is not a functional prerequisite for a task. And that consciousness is a prerequisite for feeling pain

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eagerpace 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like recursive self improvement instead. It seems like something that is actually quantifiable and kinda “the point” of why consciousness is important to humans.

	▲	fxd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So basically, being able to set it free on some long running goal and it sort of “lives” and autonomously does its own tasks? I wonder at what point consciousness is necessary… that is, if you can have anything like that without it. To the point that solving consciousness (and combining it with intelligence) is what gives you the autonomous, recursive, self-improving thing otherwise it can only drive in the dark and make big mistakes. To your point I think - it’s why we don’t see too many non-conscious advanced biology (it rarely survives against those with it).

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StopTheMods an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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