Thoughts on AGI

361 words 3 min read
AI Technology Philosophy Society

AGI IS HERE!!!!!

Ok, but is it?

GPT-6 Astra is the best model we’ve ever seen until GPT-6.1 & Fable 5.2. The jump from 5.6 to 6 is probably one of the biggest ever for a public OpenAI model, coming close to the jump between non-reasoning and reasoning models. This has led many people (with many different motivations… I heard there’s an IPO soon…) to declare that this moment, if not AGI, is the true beginning of the AGI era. Future historians will look back on September 3, 2026, as the day it all went wrong, or the day the universe was saved, or maybe both. But I’m a little confused.

I remember when GPT-4 came out. It was astounding: the level of intelligence it exhibited and what it could do. It definitely wasn’t the mythical “AGI” yet, but it was close… I think.

Imagine going back to this era, 2023. Imagine showing a regular old developer Astra. Imagine showing them the benchmarks, describing the things it can do, maybe even demoing a thing or two. Surely, they would declare that this must be AGI. Naturally, the next question seems obvious: “how has the world changed?” And our time traveler will have to shrug their arms, a little flustered, and say: “well… not much.”

Like, technically, a lot has changed! Agentic coding alone would be a pipe dream to any developer; how many developers write more than 10% of their code anymore? But for some reason, at least societally, we don’t feel that change. If I brought a person from 1859 to 2010, they would probably have an aneurysm, no AGI needed. I don’t think a regular 2023 guy would have the same reaction to 2026.

Clearly, AGI is not just the release of powerful models, it comes with expectations of what happens socially as a result of the models. Machines are already basically generally intelligent, but for some reason, it isn’t as consequential yet as we imagine it should be.

Transformers are so so powerful, it’s amazing what you can do with attention. It got us genius mathematicians and software engineers! But for some reason, we’re still waiting for that fabled “AGI.”