{"id":248786,"date":"2025-07-08T19:29:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T19:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/248786\/"},"modified":"2025-07-08T19:29:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T19:29:11","slug":"what-is-agi-nobody-agrees-and-its-tearing-microsoft-and-openai-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/248786\/","title":{"rendered":"What is AGI? Nobody agrees, and it\u2019s tearing Microsoft and OpenAI apart."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The reported $100 billion profit threshold we mentioned earlier conflates commercial success with cognitive capability, as if a system&#8217;s ability to generate revenue says anything meaningful about whether it can &#8220;think,&#8221; &#8220;reason,&#8221; or &#8220;understand&#8221; the world like a human.<\/p>\n<p>                        <img width=\"1024\" height=\"782\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/GettyImages-2188228027-1024x782.jpg\" class=\"center large\" alt=\"Sam Altman speaks onstage during The New York Times Dealbook Summit 2024 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 04, 2024 in New York City.\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\"  \/><\/p>\n<p>      Sam Altman speaks onstage during The New York Times Dealbook Summit 2024 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 4, 2024, in New York City.<\/p>\n<p>          Credit:<\/p>\n<p>                      <a class=\"caption-credit-link text-gray-400 no-underline hover:text-gray-500\" href=\"https:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/news-photo\/sam-altman-speaks-onstage-during-the-new-york-times-news-photo\/2188228027\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/p>\n<p>          Eugene Gologursky via Getty Images<\/p>\n<p>                      <\/a><\/p>\n<p>Depending on your definition, we may already have AGI, or it may be physically impossible to achieve. If you define AGI as &#8220;AI that performs better than most humans at most tasks,&#8221; then current language models potentially meet that bar for certain types of work (which tasks, which humans, what is &#8220;better&#8221;?), but agreement on whether that is true is far from universal. This says nothing of the even murkier concept of &#8220;superintelligence&#8221;\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/information-technology\/2025\/06\/after-ai-setbacks-meta-bets-billions-on-undefined-superintelligence\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">another nebulous term<\/a> for a hypothetical, god-like intellect so far beyond human cognition that, like AGI, it defies any solid definition or benchmark.<\/p>\n<p>Given this definitional chaos, researchers have tried to create objective benchmarks to measure progress toward AGI, but these attempts have revealed their own set of problems.<\/p>\n<p>Why benchmarks keep failing us<\/p>\n<p>The search for better AGI benchmarks has produced some interesting alternatives to the Turing Test. The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (<a href=\"https:\/\/arcprize.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ARC-AGI<\/a>), introduced in 2019 by Fran\u00e7ois Chollet, tests whether AI systems can solve novel visual puzzles that require deep and novel analytical reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Almost all current AI benchmarks can be solved purely via memorization,&#8221; Chollet <a href=\"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/robots-ai\/arc-prize-agi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told<\/a> Freethink in August 2024. A major problem with AI benchmarks currently stems from data contamination\u2014when test questions end up in training data, models can appear to perform well without truly &#8220;understanding&#8221; the underlying concepts. Large language models serve as master imitators, mimicking patterns found in training data, but not always originating novel solutions to problems.<\/p>\n<p>But even sophisticated benchmarks like ARC-AGI face a fundamental problem: They&#8217;re still trying to reduce intelligence to a score. And while improved benchmarks are essential for measuring empirical progress in a scientific framework, intelligence isn&#8217;t a single thing you can measure, like height or weight\u2014it&#8217;s a complex constellation of abilities that manifest differently in different contexts. Indeed, we <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/html\/2312.09546v1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">don&#8217;t even have<\/a> a complete functional definition of human intelligence, so defining artificial intelligence by any single benchmark score is likely to capture only a small part of the complete picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The reported $100 billion profit threshold we mentioned earlier conflates commercial success with cognitive capability, as if a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-248786","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114819273055877466","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}