The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines • Hacker News Board

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#201

Post by runarberg » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

tokai wrote: post #150

logicchains wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully." There are lots of meaningful definitions, the people saying we haven't reached AGI just don't use them. For most of the last half-century people would have agreed that machines that can pass the Turing test and win Math Olympiad gold are AGI.

Turing test is generally misunderstood, much like Schrodinger's cat, it has devolved in to a pop cultural meme. The test is to evaluate if a machine can think . Not if it is intelligent, not if it is human-like. Its dismissed as a useful by most experts in philosophy of mind, AI, language, etc.. Thinking cool and all but not that extraordinary. Even plants does it.

I like the analogy with Schrödinger’s cat. Like Schrödinger’s cat it is actually not a good thought experiment. Both have been debunked. Schrödinger’s cat is applying quantum behavior (of a single interaction) to a macro system (with trillions of interactions). While the Turing test can be explained away with Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment.

I would argue that Schrödinger’s cat has done more damage to the general understanding of quantum physics then it has done good. In contrary though, I don‘t think the same about the Turing test. I think it has resulted in a net positive for the theory of mind as long as people take Searle’s rebuttal into account. Without it (as is sadly common in popular philosophy) the Turing test is simply just wrong, and offers no good insight for neither philosophy nor science.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#202

Post by 10xDev » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

sulam wrote: post #131

fwipsy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how many "fundamental" limitations of AI have been resolved within the past few years, I'm skeptical. Even if you're right, I am not sure that the limitations you identified matter all that much in practice. I think very few human engineers are working on problems which are so novel and unique that AIs cannot grasp them without additional reinforcement learning. > it will delete all the files in "X/" How many "…

Sorry, but you're mistaking outputs with process. If you actually know what models are doing under the hood to product output that (admittedly) looks very convincing, you'll quickly realize that they are simply exceptionally good at statistically predicting the next token in a stream of tokens. The reason you are having to become an expert at context engineering, and the reason the labs still hire engineers, is becau…

CoT already moved things past the "it is just token prediction" phase. We have models that can perform search over a very large state space across domains with good precision and refine its own search leading to a decent level of fluid intelligence, hence why ARC AGI 1/2 is essentially solved. We also don't know the exact details of what is happening at frontier labs seen as they don't publish everything anymore.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#203

Post by dr_dshiv » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

“The impotence of naive idealism in the face of economic incentives.”

“The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines. Notably, it’s common to now talk about ASI instead, implying we may have already achieved AGI, almost without noticing.”

Amen

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#204

Post by eloisant » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

p-o wrote: post #19

I think the brunt of the disruption regarding AI is already behind us for LLMs at least. It's possible we'll see improvements over the following months/years, but government will inevitably start to catchup to the level of disinformation and confusion that AI has brought to this world. Laws & regulations that needs to be created to reign in AI will undoubtedly increase the opportunity cost of training LLMs. For some,…

I think that even if the models were to plateau today, there are still a lot of room for improvement in all the tooling around them, people finding ideas of applications, and users getting used of them. So we're not done with the disruption.

Some of the apps made possible by smartphones only appeared a decade after they were made technically possible. A lot of the new use cases made possible by the Internet and broadband connections only became widely used because of Covid.

I was already using Skype 20 years ago to make video calls, but I've only seen PTA meetings over Zoom since Covid.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#205

Post by measurablefunc » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

tsunamifury wrote: post #73

Words are Meaningless in the real world. It’s amazing that no one here gets that

Everyone here sits in front of the computer & types words all day so it's kinda like the guy whose salary depends on not understanding what he is paid to not understand. Telling programmers that no amount of arithmetic will add up to anything except a bunch of numbers is a waste of time & energy.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#206

Post by runarberg » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

zeknife wrote: post #197

runarberg wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of. The Turing test has a rigorous definition. Secondly, it has been debunked for almost half a century at this point by Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment. Thirdly, intelligence it self is a scientifically fraught term with ever changing meaning as we discover more and more “intelligent” behavior in nature (by animals and plants, and more). And to make matters worse, general intelligence is even worse, a…

>The Turing test has a rigorous definition Does it? Where?

In the original paper https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dprecup/courses/AI/Materials/turin...

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#207

Post by shepherdjerred » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

djoldman wrote: post #116

Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully." Or the long version: "something about which no conclusions can be drawn because the proposed definitions lack sufficient precision and completeness." Or the short versions: "Skippetyboop," "plipnikop," and "zingybang."

They define AGI in their charter

> artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#208

Post by famouswaffles » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

ACCount37 wrote: post #187

sulam wrote: post #122

The reality is that current models are simply nowhere near AGI. Next token prediction has been pushed very far, and proven to have applicability far beyond the original domain it was designed for (reasoning models are an application I would not have predicted) but it is fundamentally not AGI. It has no real world model, no ability to learn in any but superficial ways, and without extensive scaffolding this is all ver…

Given the mechanistic interpretability findings? I'm not sure how people still say shit like "no real world model" seriously.

People just overstate their understanding and knowledge, the usual human stuff. The same user has a comment in this thread that contains:

'If you actually know what models are doing under the hood to product output that...'

Any one that tells you they know 'what models are dong under the hood' simply has no idea what they're talking about, and it's amazing how common this is.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#209

Post by ryandrake » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #183

politelemon wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The enskibidification of AI

Honestly, not enough of a joke. I was thinking something similar - this isn't AI, and none of "those people" care if it is or isn't. They don't care philosophically, or even pragmatically. They're selling a product. That product is the IDEA of replacement of the majority of human labor with what's basically slave labor but with substantially disregardable ethical quandaries. It's honestly a genius product. I'm not su…

AI is already "an employee who can't say no to questionable assignments." We should all be reflective about the real value and inevitable consequences of this work.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#210

Post by ozgung » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

djoldman wrote: post #116

Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully." Or the long version: "something about which no conclusions can be drawn because the proposed definitions lack sufficient precision and completeness." Or the short versions: "Skippetyboop," "plipnikop," and "zingybang."

That’s the problem with the discussions on AI. No one defines the terms they use.

If we define AGI as an AI not doing a preset task but can be used for general purpose, then we already have that. If we define it as human level intelligence at _every_ task, then some humans fail to be an AGI. If we define AGI as a magic algorithm that does every task autonomously and successfully then that thing may not exist at all, even inside our brains.

When the AGI term was first coined they probably meant something like HAL 9000. We have that now (and HAL gaining self-awareness or refusing commands are just for dramatic effect and not necessary). Goalposts are not stable in this game.