Stop Making Sense
Peter Flint discussing how functional AGI is already here:
Something has changed. We are calling it “functional AGI.”There’s a version of the AGI debate that will go on forever — philosophers and researchers arguing about consciousness, general reasoning, and what “general” even means. That debate is real and worth having. But there’s another way to understand what AGI means in practice, and it has nothing to do with benchmarks.
The functional definition is behavioral: AGI arrives when people stop auditing the intelligence and start relying on it. That day has quietly arrived for many. For most people, on most tasks, most days, AI has quietly become the default. The other way still exists. It just increasingly feels like the old way.
I don’t disagree with the observation. However, there is danger in relying on something if you don’t fully grasp the what, how or why. As I thought Ed Catmull observed in Creativity Inc. but I can't find the attribution:
The only thing worse than having a hit, is making a hit and not understanding how you got there.