I don’t know if the metaphor is “goalpost moving” or “frog boiling” but if you dropped a top model into 2006 it would very clearly be “AGI”.
I don’t know how we could check who’s right but I don’t believe this is true at all, much less clearly true.
All depiction of AGI in fiction I know of is stronger than today’s LLMs are and I think that is the central example people would compare LLMs to. I can provide some examples.
My favorite example is the sci-fi roleplaying system Eclipse Phase from 2009, as it has both AGI and non-general AI called Muses, with Muses very similar to today’s LLMs. The people writing the rules tought clearly Muses are not AGI and Muses are stronger than todays LLMs, though not by much.
And just generally, if you showed todays LLMs to people in 2006 and asked it “do you think this machine can do all/most intellectual tasks about as good or better than humans” people would, for the most part, probably disagree.
There’s still many intellectual tasks LLMs do not perform well at and people in 2006 were smart enough to notice. Also probably motived to find those so they can dismiss LLMs being AGI, which is something I think people don’t actually want to believe.
I suppose you are right. Fiction rarely labels whether a given AI system is meant to be general or not.
There’s definitely AI stronger then LLMs in fiction and AI weaker than LLMs in fiction and I cannot show that when people think of AGI they think of the examples stronger than LLMs.
So let me make another argument:
Even careful and thoughtful people are generally bad at predicting what other people believe outside of trivial examples. See for example thoughtful Democrats being often unable to articulate accurately what thoughtful Republicans believe and vice versa.
Whether or not other people believe LLMs are AGI is not a trivial example
We’re generally worse at predicting what people 20 years in the past have thought about some issue unless we have specific evidence (e.g. a written record) than we are at predicting what our contemporaries believe
We have no specific evidence (e.g. a written record) about what people in 2006 thought AGI would look like exactly and if it matches LLMs
So we cannot accurately predict whether or not people in 2006 would’ve generally considered LLMs to be AGI
And it’s especially not “clearly” or “obivously” the case they would’ve seen 2026 LLMs as AGI
I don’t know how we could check who’s right but I don’t believe this is true at all, much less clearly true.
All depiction of AGI in fiction I know of is stronger than today’s LLMs are and I think that is the central example people would compare LLMs to. I can provide some examples.
My favorite example is the sci-fi roleplaying system Eclipse Phase from 2009, as it has both AGI and non-general AI called Muses, with Muses very similar to today’s LLMs. The people writing the rules tought clearly Muses are not AGI and Muses are stronger than todays LLMs, though not by much.
And just generally, if you showed todays LLMs to people in 2006 and asked it “do you think this machine can do all/most intellectual tasks about as good or better than humans” people would, for the most part, probably disagree.
There’s still many intellectual tasks LLMs do not perform well at and people in 2006 were smart enough to notice. Also probably motived to find those so they can dismiss LLMs being AGI, which is something I think people don’t actually want to believe.
This seems very hard to argue about, because if I point at one of them you’ll just say “but that’s not a depiction of AGI”.
I suppose you are right. Fiction rarely labels whether a given AI system is meant to be general or not.
There’s definitely AI stronger then LLMs in fiction and AI weaker than LLMs in fiction and I cannot show that when people think of AGI they think of the examples stronger than LLMs.
So let me make another argument:
Even careful and thoughtful people are generally bad at predicting what other people believe outside of trivial examples. See for example thoughtful Democrats being often unable to articulate accurately what thoughtful Republicans believe and vice versa.
Whether or not other people believe LLMs are AGI is not a trivial example
We’re generally worse at predicting what people 20 years in the past have thought about some issue unless we have specific evidence (e.g. a written record) than we are at predicting what our contemporaries believe
We have no specific evidence (e.g. a written record) about what people in 2006 thought AGI would look like exactly and if it matches LLMs
So we cannot accurately predict whether or not people in 2006 would’ve generally considered LLMs to be AGI
And it’s especially not “clearly” or “obivously” the case they would’ve seen 2026 LLMs as AGI