Enough with AGI, please

Apparently an OpenAI employee claims that they have already achieved hashtag#AGI, or perhaps AGI-, not AGI++: "better than most humans at most tasks". I find this annoying and problematic. Annoying because some hashtag#AI models, even generalist models, perform much better than humans at an increasing number of "tasks", so why do we care about AGI? But ok, perhaps an AGI can exfiltrate its parameters and take over the planet, so there is that.

But I find it problematic for lots of reasons, two of which I outline here:

• What, exactly is a "task"? Some activity with a performance metric attached. Defining an "AGI" through task performance metrics reduces the humans it is compared with to task performers. Is that all we do? Perform tasks? I think that if somehow a general human-level intelligence were to emerge, it would have to do more than perform tasks. Consciousness, day dreaming, physical grouding, spirituality would be part of its make up.

• Even in the universe of all possible tasks (assuming that it can be defined), Ethan Mollick reminds us of the "jagged frontier", this very unpredictable border between tasks that AI (mostly hashtag#LLMs) are great at and the ones that AI is not so good or even miserable at. For example, changing one word in a prompt can drastically alter the output. Or changing the definition of a task in a way that seems benign can unravel the AI's performance. Given that we can't test every possible task out there, the assumption of "continuity" is violated on the jagged frontier. You can never be sure that a microscopic difference in situations will not lead to a lethal degradation of the AI's performance.

So, for now, we are exploring the universe of tasks the Ethan Mollick way, one use case at a time, and that's totally fine by me.