Road to Artificial General Intelligence

I would be very interested in a set of benchmarks and intermediate goals for safe AGI (i.e. AGI that is aligned with human interests) rather than just AGI itself.

Which humans?

Honestly could probably create an AI that figures out high speed training, I wouldn’t call it AGI

It doesn't even matter what's in the article, the fact that this is on the HN front page tells me it's going to happen - though who knows when

For context I've been "into" AGI since I read the term in the late 1990s in a Ray Kurzweil book and decided that I was going to work my whole life to realize it

Much later, Ben Goertzel (arguably the guy to popularize the term) was my Masters Thesis advisor, at the National Intelligence University in 2013 (Literally a secret graduate school program for people in the intelligence community). My thesis was "How will AGI impact national security."

Almost nobody cared then, though I did have a lovely lunch with Yoshua Bengio in 2014 at the Quebec AGI conference. Ben has hosted the AGI conference since 2008 and it has always been sparsely attended.

In fact bringing up AGI was likely to get you laughed out of any gathering of computer scientists - and outside of that it was pure speculative science fiction.

It's tragically sad to me that, inevitably, the early people who have been thinking about and working on and pushing this vision since day one will likely not be the ones who realize it. Such is life

edit: Worth acknowledging that this was the original vision of computers after all - the business people fucked it up

The already placed checkmarks are wrong. An AGI by this list would be able to beat humans at chess and win an art competition, both of which are already checked off. But the chess playing AI and the art competition AI are completely separate systems, the art AI can't win a game at chess, it doesn't know a single thing about chess and it's never going to and vice versa. By this checkmark logic you could complete the whole list with one specialized neural net for each task and, while that would be an absolutely quantum leap in technology and the ramifications for the world, it still wouldn't be AGI. I know he discusses this at the beginning to say that computers can win at chess without being general but then the idea of generalness is basically just left there. Items should only be checked off when one system is capable of completing both tasks.