@jasmine has a great blog on the quest to determine the definition of agi. It continues its streak to have a lot of definitions but none a majority agree on. No matter how you cut it, the definition encompasses some version of "vastness." As a result, it can act as a powerful motivator in an organization. It lets the lab workers (employees? researchers?) attribute their own hazy version of the vision on to it.
That said, one of the setup paragraphs made me lol
> I brought my questions to a friend, who shrugged it off as semantic. “We’ll know AGI when we see it,” he said. “It’s like that court case about obscenity.” I asked an AI engineer I knew the same question, but he replied that answering was impossible: “It’s like asking when aliens will land on earth.” I’m surprised at their confidence in porn and aliens, to be honest; if we still can’t settle disputes about nipples and UFOs, how do we expect to agree on the nature of intelligence itself?Jasmine touches upon their perspective on what "agi" stands for
> I think “AGI” is better understood through the lenses of faith, field-building, and ingroup signaling than as a concrete technical milestone. AGI represents an ambition and an aspiration; a Schelling point, a shibboleth.I particularly resonate with how they claim "agi" will be unleashed to the world
> Some company will declare that it reached AGI first, maybe an upstart trying to make a splash or raise a round, maybe after acing a slate of benchmarks. We’ll all argue on Twitter over whether it counts, and the argument will be fiercer if the model is internal-only and/or not open-weights. Regulators will take a second look. Enterprise software will be sold. All the while, the outside world will look basically the same as the day before.[7](https://jasmi.news/p/agi?__readwiseLocation=&ref=birchtree.me#footnote-7-161039486)before heading to a practical approach to dealing with AI
> And like with climate change, we ought to frame AI progress not as a binary of safe/unsafe or AGI/not-AGI, but as a [jagged frontier](https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the-jagged) of capabilities with risks that depend on where you’re looking.[9](https://jasmi.news/p/agi?__readwiseLocation=&ref=birchtree.me#footnote-9-161039486) AI discovered wholly new proteins before it could count the ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’, which makes it neither vaporware nor a demigod but a secret third thing.