AGI Is Already Here, Its Just Unevenly Distributed
First a poem for thee, from me -
For every Winter there is a summer,
Heralded as mind boggling in the Black and White days,
It’s sadly just an NPC nowadays,
The Deepest Blue casts a mere regal shadow,
Bayes with its greying locks,
Stands guard against spam, their strikes rather shallow,
A plaything today built with 30 simple blocks.
Statistics decodes tongues and captured pixels with awe,
They rest as relics in the vault of quiet mastery,
Deep nets pried open the black box in all its majesty,
Unleashing storms of insight - stepping stones along an unstoppable path,
The Alpha toppled centuries of intelligence on a 19×19 grid,
It now unfolds hidden mysteries of life,
Mapping elusive secrets that used to slid.
The Siren’s attention, is all that one needed,
To get to the OG eating its Peas and sipping its Teas,
It spun oceans of words, finally resting Turing and his unconquerable test.
But lo and behold,
We spring medusa with an ineffective stare,
MNIST, The Net Cousins and so on,
Were the snakes' early forms,
They are now the glue, superglue and they all Maybe Maybe Love U.
While the OG increased its number to four,
Hallucinating logic from chaos, a hopeful glimmer of threads of thought,
It married words and images in a seamless dance,
Almost Omniscient, just almost,
But yet we thought it was maybe yet Another Generic Intelligence.
The Omniscient Four and all its llama friends cut snakes over and over,
And while we waited for them to die,
And be replaced with eventually that is perhaps maybe Another Generic Intelligence.
O1 today claims new frontiers on the far edge of possibility,
But Look!
In three short months, a successor rises,
Skipping a beat,
And soon, a hop and maybe a jump away,
We wait for something that is not yet Another Generic Intelligence,
We fail to realize because it passed it by so fast,
That which has come and gone and is firmly in the rearview mirror,
Was General enough already from yesterday.
I wanted to write an essay about how I feel that the AI available today is currently already general enough to be thought as AGI. It was meant to be a chronology of the various milestones that have been toppled by AI over time, but I ended up with this poem instead. It is not the greatest work of art, but I could have never banged it out in about half an hour without help from AI.
The problem with claiming "AGI is here" is the "my definition of AGI" problem. We (as in humanity) have been moving the goalposts with ever more sophisticated benchmarks as the AI models improved and kept on beating them over and over again, starting with the Turing Test, Chess, Go, Protein Folding and so on.
"Hmmm, yeah, it does that very well...but can it do this?" - humanity to the latest AI model.
AI today can write, read, see, hear and can move machines physically. "When will we stop waiting for AGI?", I asked myself. And the answer was that it is already here. There are two issues which I feel are keeping this feeling from going mainstream -
- It just came so fast that we haven't been able to process it yet.
- The current set of models are good at something, but are bad at other things. (Just like a human being) But the point is that they can do multiple things, via a single model. The sheer number of things being built on top of them is limitless, and we have barely gotten started.
It can now even be a voice assistant for a gun sentry. Is that general enough?
Ben Evans best put it. Machine Learning just becomes "software" once it starts working.
AGI is already here, its just unevenly distributed.[1]