On AGI

Everyone has an AGI timeline. Few agree on what we are timing. Andrej Karpathy has suggested AGI could be a system you’d hire for almost any job. Elon Musk describes it as anything a human with a computer can do. A recent paper, "A Definition of AGI", grounds its proposal in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model of human cognition, building a composite index of abilities. It feels concrete until you poke it.

The logic is inductive: observe human abilities, group them, and claim that matching the list equals general intelligence. It’s pattern collection dressed as definition. Every checklist breaks when novelty appears. A system that passes today’s tasks might still fail tomorrow’s because the space of possible tasks has no boundary. This underlying mechanism of intelligence remains untouched.

To be fair, these definitions serve a purpose. Labs need milestones, investors want progress bars, journals want a story. What it really offers is organization, beautifully arranged, that lets us move together while searching for better answers.

We’ve done this before. Before Newton, astronomers charted motions. Before Darwin, naturalists classified species. Before Watson and Crick, Mendel saw ratios. In every case, classification led and understanding followed. AGI definitions today are our equivalent of those early tables, waiting for a unifying principle.

If that principle shows up, it will look less like a benchmark and more like a theory of knowledge. As David Deutsch puts it, intelligence is the capacity for universal explanation, the ability to learn, create, and refine new knowledge. Human brains likely haven’t changed much biologically in 500 years. What changed is the culture and information they operate on. General intelligence lies in the "wiring", the ability to generate explanations. Knowledge and culture provide the raw material.

AGI will emerge from systems that autonomously explore, question, and apply knowledge, able to adapt to the unknown and expand what can be known. That’s what makes it "general".

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.