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Posted by pegasus 3 days ago

A definition of AGI(arxiv.org)
304 points | 505 commentspage 3
paulcx 1 day ago|
What if the Wright brothers had to pass a “bird exam”? That’s how we’re defining AGI today. Stop grading feathers; start designing thrust. Check out my new post: "If This Is How We Define AGI, I'm Out" - https://open.substack.com/pub/paulochen/p/if-this-is-how-we-...
SirMaster 2 days ago||
Isn't part of the cognitive versatility of a human how fast and well they can learn a new subject without having to ingest so much training content on it?

Like in order for an LLM to come close to a human proficiency on a topic, the LLM seems to have to ingest a LOT more content than a human.

mitthrowaway2 3 days ago||
Quite the list of authors. If they all personally approved the text, it's an achievement in itself just to get all of them to agree on a definition.
mrsvanwinkle 3 days ago|
indeed, i am wondering if these hn comments actually have an idea and they rub shoulders with these names with their dismissive confidence.
optimalsolver 3 days ago||
Maybe one of these exalted names should've proof-read the paper:

https://x.com/m2saxon/status/1979349387391439198

Der_Einzige 3 days ago||
Most people who say "AGI" really mean either "ASI" or "Recursive Self Improvement".

AGI was already here the day ChatGPT released: That's Peter Norvig's take too: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

mitthrowaway2 3 days ago||
The reason some people treat these as equivalent is that AI algorithm research is one of the things a well-educated adult human can do, so an AGI who commits to that task should be able to improve itself, and if it makes a substantial improvement, then it would become or be replaced by an ASI.

To some people this is self-evident so the terms are equivalent, but it does require some extra assumptions: that the AI would spend time developing AI, that human intelligence isn't already the maximum reachable limit, and that the AGI really is an AGI capable of novel research beyond parroting from its training set.

I think those assumptions are pretty easy to grant, but to some people they're obviously true and to others they're obviously false. So depending on your views on those, AGI and ASI will or will not mean the same thing.

photonthug 2 days ago||
Funny but the eyebrow-raising phrase 'recursive self-improvement' is mentioned in TFA in an example about "style adherence" that's completely unrelated to the concept. Pretty clearly a scam where authors are trying to hack searches.

Prerequisite for recursive self-improvement and far short of ASI, any conception of AGI really really needs to be expanded to include some kind of self-model. This is conspicuously missing from TFA. Related basic questions are: What's in the training set? What's the confidence on any given answer? How much of the network is actually required for answering any given question?

Partly this stuff is just hard and mechanistic interpretability as a field is still trying to get traction in many ways, but also, the whole thing is kind of fundamentally not aligned with corporate / commercial interests. Still, anything that you might want to call intelligent has a working self-model with some access to information about internal status. Things that are mentioned in TFA (like working memory) might be involved and necessary, but don't really seem sufficient

throwanem 3 days ago||
How, summing (not averaging) to 58 of 1000 possible points (0-100 in each of ten domains), are we calling this score 58% rather than 5.8%?
NitpickLawyer 3 days ago||
It's confusing. The 10 tracks each get 10%. So they add up all the percentages from every track. When you see the first table, 10% on math means "perfect" math basically. Not 10% of math track.
alexwebb2 3 days ago||
0-10 in each domain. It’s a weird table.
jagrsw 2 days ago||
The simple additive scoring here is sus here. It means a model that's perfect on 9/10 axes but scores 0% on Speed (i.e., takes effectively infinite time to produce a result) would be considered "90% AGI".

By this logic, a vast parallel search running on Commodore 64s that produces an answer after BeaverNumber(100) years would be almost AGI, which doesn't pass the sniff test.

A more meaningful metric would be more multiplicative in nature.

Animats 2 days ago||
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18212

That 10-axis radial graph is very interesting. Do others besides this author agree with that representation?

The weak points are speed and long-term memory. Those are usually fixable in computing system. Weak long-term memory indicates that, somehow, a database needs to be bolted on. I've seen at least one system, for driving NPCs, where, after something interesting has happened, the system is asked to summarize what it learned from that session. That's stored somewhere outside the LLM and fed back in as a prompt when needed.

None of this addresses unstructured physical manipulation, which is still a huge hangup for robotics.

flimflamm 2 days ago|
I would focus on lowest of the axis. It does not help if some of the axis are at 100% if one of the axis is lacking.
Animats 1 day ago||
My point is that the axes chosen are important, and if this is a good rating system, we ought to see those radial charts for the different models and systems available.
ants_everywhere 3 days ago||
> To operationalize this, we ground our methodology in Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, the most empirically validated model of human cognition

Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, like a lot of psychometric research, is based on collecting a lot of data and running factor analysis (or similar) to look for axes that seem orthogonal.

It's not clear that the axes are necessary or sufficient to define intelligence, especially if the goal is to define intelligence that applies to non-humans.

For example reading and writing ability and visual processing imply the organism has light sensors, which it may not. Do all intelligent beings have vision? I don't see an obvious reason why they would.

Whatever definition you use for AGI probably shouldn't depend heavily on having analyzed human-specific data for the same reason that your definition of what counts as music shouldn't depend entirely on inferences from a single genre.

UltraSane 2 days ago||
I would define AGI as any artificial system that could learn any skill a human can by using the same inputs.
keepamovin 2 days ago||
I think if you can put an AI in a humanoid robot (control for appearance), and it can convince me that it's a human after interacting it for a couple of months (control for edgecases), I'd consider it AGI. Surely it might be "smarter than" a human, but for the purpose of my assessing whether it's AGI, interacting with something "way smarter" would be distracting and hamper the assessment, so it has to be "play human" for the purpose of the task. If it can do that, AGI, I'd say. That would be pretty cool. Surely, this is coming, soon.
daxfohl 2 days ago|
It's easy: we have reached AGI when there are zero jobs left. Or at least non manual labor jobs. If there is a single non-physical job left, then that means that person must be doing something that AI can't, so by definition, it's not AGI.

I think it'll be a steep sigmoid function. For a long time it'll be a productivity booster, but not enough "common sense" to replace people. We'll all laugh about how silly it was to worry about AI taking our jobs. Then some AI model will finally get over that last hump, maybe 10 or 20 years from now (or 1000, or 2}, and it will be only a couple months before everything collapses.

__MatrixMan__ 2 days ago|
I dislike your definition. There are many problems besides economic ones. If you defined "general" to mean "things the economy cares about", then what do you call the sorts of intelligences that are capable of things that the economically relevant ones are not?

A specific key opens a subset of locks, a general key would open all locks. General intelligence, then, can solve all solvable problems. It's rather arrogant to suppose that humans have it ourselves or that we can create something that does.

daxfohl 2 days ago||
It also partitions jobs into physical and intellectual aspects alone. Lots of jobs have a huge emotional/relational/empathetic components too. A teacher could get by being purely intellectual, but the really great ones have motivational/inspirational/caring aspects that an AI never could. Even if an AI says the exact same things, it doesn't have the same effect because everyone knows it's just an algorithm.
ZoomZoomZoom 2 days ago||
And most people get by on those jobs by faking the emotional component, at least some of the time. AGI presumably can fake perfectly and never burn out.
habinero 2 days ago||
> And most people get by on those jobs by faking the emotional component

If you think this is true, I would say you should leave artificial life alone until you can understand human beings better.

ZoomZoomZoom 2 days ago||
Have a long talk with any working teacher or therapist. If you think the regular workload is adequate for them to offer enough genuine emotional support for all the people they work with, always, everyday, regardless of their personal circumstances, you're mistaken. Or the person you're talking with is incredibly lucky.
daxfohl 2 days ago||
It doesn't have to be much, or intentional, or even good for that matter. My kids practice piano because they don't want to let their teacher down. (Well, one does. The other is made to practice because WE don't want to let the teacher down).

If the teacher was a robot, I don't think the piano would get practiced.

IDK how AI gains that ability. The requirement is basically "being human". And it seems like there's always going to be a need for humans in that space, no matter how smart AI gets.

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