"Achieving AGI" strikes me as a mostly meaningless phrase. I'm skeptical that it is a boolean event. They're already smarter in some ways, their impact is large and gradually rising, the set of specific tasks that they aren't capable of is gradually shrinking. If AGI means anything useful, it seems like we'll only see it in hindsight and have to argue over when "it" happened.

Likewise the singularity. While recursive self-improvement is theoretically trivial (just tweak a random subset of weights like a monkey with a typewriter, eventually you'll get something smarter), the resulting exponential improvement is still very hypothetical and feels unlikely. Unless you're ok with an exponent of 1.000000000000000001.

"smarter in some ways" != "general intelligence"

I agree we will only see it in hindsight, but I think that's always the case with any technology. It seems worse until it's suddenly better. I don't think it matters to argue the exact moment though. For example when did cars become clearly better than horses? No one cares about the exact date.

These are not my stated ambitions, they are the ambitions that Anthropic and Dario have said they are pursuing. Whether or not they are realistic is not relevant to this thread. The credibility of the plans are relevant to the S-1 and anyone who purchases stock from them, but for the purposes of this thread, it is only important that Anthropic believes it has credible chances of achieving this goal, and in particular that it has a competitive advantage, could do so first, and that being first could have a very large upside.