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The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point [Linkpost]
agentic-ai

The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point [Linkpost]

LessWrong · Jun 13, 2026, 4:15 PM

The reason I wanted to make this linkpost now rather than some other time is because discussions over AGI and whether or not LLMs are or aren't AGI, and the point of the linkpost is that the term AGI is for our purposes useless at this point, because we are now in the fuzzy cloud now that AI can do real economic work.Some choice paragraphs:It used to seem possible that, in practice, the differences between these definitions might not matter all that much. If AI capabilities progressed smoothly—say, from mouse- to chimp- to human-level, or from preschooler to high schooler to PhD graduate—then all of the above definitions might be fulfilled at roughly the same time.These days, though, it’s clear that AI capabilities are highly jagged. This makes it likely that there could be big gaps between when different definitions of AGI are fulfilled.I think this was an underrated reason for why the term AGI lost its value, because as it turned out, certain definitions that do connect/correlate very well in humans are easier to disentangle than we thought for AIs (though humans are also jagged, but we don't realize because we are comparing against our own baselines).On the usefulness of AGI 1-2 decades ago:It’s not inherently bad for a concept to be fuzzy - many useful concepts are. Love, life, justice, freedom… As long as invoking the concept lets you gesture in a direction that your listener understands, fuzziness doesn’t have to be a big problem.For a long time, this was the situation with AGI: we were far enough away from the fuzzy cloud that the specifics didn’t really matter. Back when the term was coined in the early 2000s, the point of talking about artificial “general” intelligence was to contrast with the “narrow” AI systems that existed at the time. “Narrow AI” refers to models that can each do one specific thing, like recognizing zip codes, detecting credit card fraud, or filtering spam. Back when the AI that we could build in reality was far from any definition of A

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