Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here

Ultimately ‘AGI’ is a pretty contested term, such that there’s no simple answer to where the threshold is. But I agree with Arcas and Norvig (Norvig in particular is a very careful thinker who I have great respect for) that by many definitions we’ve crossed that threshold, albeit just barely.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) means many different things to different people, but the most important parts of it have already been achieved by the current generation of advanced AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Bard, LLaMA and Claude. These “frontier models” have many flaws: They hallucinate scholarly citations and court cases, perpetuate biases from their training data and make simple arithmetic mistakes. Fixing every flaw (including those often exhibited by humans) would involve building an artificial superintelligence, which is a whole other project.

Nevertheless, today’s frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for, crossing a threshold that previous generations of AI and supervised deep learning systems never managed. Decades from now, they will be recognized as the first true examples of AGI, just as the 1945 ENIAC is now recognized as the first true general-purpose electronic computer.

 

Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here