[HN Gopher] What Is Artificial General Intelligence?
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What Is Artificial General Intelligence?
Author : SweetSoftPillow
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-09-29 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| comeonbro wrote:
| > simp-maxxing
|
| Might want to write this out in full lol I thought this in
| particular was going to be a much more entertaining point.
| zahlman wrote:
| To be fair, it is spelled with a single 'x' in the paper.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| A term in search of a definition, clearly.
| mbgerring wrote:
| From what I can see, Artificial General Intelligence is a drug-
| fueled millenarian cult, and attempts to define it that don't
| consider this angle will fail.
| nativeit wrote:
| This feels like we're approaching consensus.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418763
| nativeit wrote:
| Artificial general intelligence is a term of art for charlatans
| who rely on continued blind investments on the order of billions
| to continue their quixotic (or just cynical) efforts to anoint
| LLMs with the Holy Water of tech hype[0], blessed by dense
| forests of jargon and needless anthropomorphisms, and satiated
| only by ritual human [labor] sacrifices. -- 0: Tech hype holy
| water is 99.99% Red Bull
| zwnow wrote:
| Sir we are on hackernews. AI glazers lure in every corner ready
| to jump at everything critiquing their holy water. Blind to all
| the theft, blind to all the issues.
| ronsor wrote:
| That's funny. I see half of everyone on HN being critical of
| AI, often unfairly so, but we only ever notice the people we
| disagree with.
|
| I'm guilty of this as well, otherwise I wouldn't be writing
| this.
| emil-lp wrote:
| I think most here see AI as a scam and a bubble, but the
| pro-AI wing has a lot of accounts.
|
| I mean, who has an incentive? Those who want to keep
| selling.
| eurekin wrote:
| Im a big AI/ML enthusiast (published one paper!) and was
| always flabbergasted to see scientists go off the typical
| provable/ testable lane and venture into philosophical and
| emotional territories
| emil-lp wrote:
| Stuart Russell said AGI is coming and that we will get 45
| trillion dollars from them.
|
| That's what I'm waiting for.
|
| (He didn't specify when or how the money will get here, but I'm
| betting that I'll get my fair share.)
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| I (and I'm being serious) assumed AGI would break into the
| world's financial institutions and steal the 45 trillion.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I'm not sure if there's anything interesting here, but I did
| notice the author was interviewed on the podcast Machine Learning
| Street Talk about this paper,
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K18Gmp2oXIM&t=3s
| jongjong wrote:
| It's been a moving goalpost but I think the point where people
| will be forced to acknowledge it is when fully autonomous agents
| are outcompeting most humans in most areas.
|
| So long as half of people are employed or in business, these
| people will insist that it's not AGI yet.
|
| Until AI can fully replace you in your job, it's going to
| continue to feel like a tool.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I wonder if all the grad students that struggle to find jobs
| now and all the cheap workers in India who were laid off are
| "feeling the AGI" then.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Robotics are also a big one.
|
| Given a useful-enough general purpose body (with multiple
| appendage options), one of the most significant applications of
| whatever we end up calling AGI should be _finally_ seeing most
| of our household chores properly roboticized.
|
| When I can actually give plain language descriptions of
| 'simple' manual tasks around the house to a machine the same
| way I would to, say, a human 4th grader, and not have to spend
| more time helping it get through the task than it would take me
| to do it myself, that is when I will feel we have turned the
| corner.
|
| I still am not at all convinced I will see this within the next
| few decades I probably have left.
| lazide wrote:
| The military would pay 1000x what a household would for the
| same capability, and they are nowhere near the ability to do
| that. Which should tell you all you need to know.
| realityfactchex wrote:
| It would mean actually reasoning, not just applying stats to look
| like reasoning.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _Picture a machine endowed with human intellect. In its most
| simplistic form, that is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)_
|
| Artificial human intelligence. Not what I'd call general, but I
| guess so long as we make it clear that by "general" we don't
| actually mean general, fine. I'd really expect _actual_ general
| intelligence to do a lot better than human, in ways we can 't
| understand any more than ants can comprehend us.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Please fix the title in HN to match the actual paper's superior
| title: "What the F*ck Is Artificial General Intelligence?"
| nis0s wrote:
| Per my view, it fulfills the following criteria:
|
| 1) Few-shot to zero-shot training for achieving a useful ability
| on a given new problem.
|
| 2) Self-determining optimal paths to fine-tuning at inference
| time based on minimal instructions or examples.
|
| 3) Having the capacity to self-correct, maybe by building or
| confirming heuristics.
|
| All of these concern an intern, for example, who is given a new,
| unseen task and can figure out the rest without handholding.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| My answer: while 99% of the AI community was busy working on Weak
| AI, that is, developing systems that could perform tasks that
| humans can do notionally because of our Big Brains, a tiny
| fraction of people promoted Hard AI, that is, AI as a
| philosophical recreation of Lt. Commander Data.
|
| Hard AI has long had a well-deserved jet black reputation as a
| flakey field filled with armchair philosophers, hucksters,
| impressarios, and Loebner followers who don't understand the
| Turing Test. It eventually got so bad that the entire field
| decided to rebrand itself as "Artificial General Intelligence".
| But it's the same duck.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The only difference is the same hucksters are trying to sell
| the notion that LLMs are or will become AGI through some sort
| of magic trick or with just one more input.
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