I don't know if the metaphor is "goalpost moving" or "frog boiling" but if you dropped a top model into 2006 it would very clearly be "AGI".
I don't know how we could check who's right but I don't believe this is true at all, much less clearly true.
All depiction of AGI in fiction I know of is stronger than today's LLMs are and I think that is the central example people would compare LLMs to. I can provide some examples.
My favorite example is the sci-fi roleplaying system Eclipse Phase from 2009, as it has both AGI and non-general AI called Muses, with Muses very similar to today's LLMs. The people writing the rules tought clearly Muses are not AGI and Muses are stronger than todays LLMs, though not by much.
And just generally, if you showed todays LLMs to people in 2006 and asked it "do you think this machine can do all/most intellectual tasks about as good or better than humans" people would, for the most part, probably disagree.
There's still many intellectual tasks LLMs do not perform well at and people in 2006 were smart enough to notice. Also probably motived to find those so they can dismiss LLMs being AGI, which is something I think people don't actually want to believe.
I suppose you are right. Fiction rarely labels whether a given AI system is meant to be general or not.
There's definitely AI stronger then LLMs in fiction and AI weaker than LLMs in fiction and I cannot show that when people think of AGI they think of the examples stronger than LLMs.
So let me make another argument:
I've had several conversations with people over the last few weeks that have highlighted how far apart my view of the near future is from many people I talk to. Here are some things I might tweet if that was the kind of thing I did:
AI has a very real chance of getting us all killed. I think it probably won't because I expect a lot of people to work very hard to avoid that outcome.
AI is so quickly approaching (or exceeding) expert human abilities across so many areas that most people should be planning for 1-3 more years in which they can productively contribute. Use the time well!
But also don't live your life in a way where if it takes longer than that you're destitute; there's still a lot of uncertainty in how quickly this plays out.
We are already seeing AI speeding up the development of AI, as it substitutes for human expertise. As the remaining human contribution gets smaller I expect this to compound dramatically, and we'll see rapid improvement even compared to today.
I don't know if the metaphor is "goalpost moving" or "frog boiling" but if you dropped a top model into 2006 it would very clearly be "AGI".
If you think AI isn't improving rapidly you're doing some combination of not applying it to hard enough problems, not giving it enough context/tooling/tokens, or not using top models.
I'm worried about the environmental impacts of data centers, in that I see plausible near futures in which the world produces vastly more energy than it does today and almost all of it goes into powering computers.
Many paths to appropriately serious action run through warning shots, and we've been getting some. So far they look like hacks, and there will be more. Aside: information that should not become public is increasingly dangerous to keep.
Lots of people have plans to make the world better by improving X to improve Y to improve Z, where it's Z that matters. If Z is more than 3y out, consider finding a different plan.
If AI goes well I think the world could be extremely good. The bottom 10% living far better than the top 10% do now. This is the promise that gets people working so hard to build something so dangerous.
I'm being a bit lazy here because the tweet format means I can make bold claims without backing any of them up. If you think I'm wrong on any of these, happy to give arguments in the comments.
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