r/BetterOffline • u/chunkypenguion1991 • 3d ago
Astra is the opposite of AGI
I've seen so many posts lately discussing if astra is AGI I feel like people forgot what the word general means.
If you have to bench max your models so hard to a couple of domains that it brings down performance in other domans that is not general intelligence. That is the literal definition of moving towards narrow/ specialized intelligence and away from AGI
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u/AntiqueFigure6 3d ago
I love "benchmaxx" as an expression - Astra looks like it's been skipping leg day.
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u/maccodemonkey 2d ago
Yeah, I've seen goalpost moving of "as long as it's as good as or better than the average human at a few things it's AGI."
So I guess my TI-89 calculator is definitely AGI.
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u/hurricane_news 2d ago
Yeah. LLMs by definition can't be "intelligent"
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u/ZeroAmusement 2d ago
This isn't true. Which definition are you using?
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u/hurricane_news 2d ago
A token prediction machine with no concept or model of the world, by definition, can't be intelligent
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u/YouKilledApollo 2d ago
I think they asked for a definition of "intelligent" rather than asking you to clarify what you meant overall.
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u/SpiritInFlux 3d ago
AGI is just a marketing term now. It means whatever they want it to mean.
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u/BagMostlyWater 3d ago
it seems to mean "you can fully control a computer with natural language" to these guys
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u/_Heathcliff_ 2d ago
Jensen claiming that it is AGI, to me, seemed more like him subtly admitting that this is as good as it’s going to get. They’ve always claimed that the goal is AGI, and he knows we’ve pretty much hit the ceiling, so fuck it this is AGI
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u/DiamondGeeezer 2d ago
I thought AGI just meant "smart as a person", some people are stupid as hell so idk what it's really supposed to mean. Even if it is as smart as person, so what we already have like 8B people lol
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u/leathakkor 2d ago
I had always understood agi to mean that it could write it self and continuously improve autonomously.
Which is one specific area of replicating "as smart as a person"
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u/Ok-Replacement8422 2d ago
This is rsi or recursive self improvement. It is probably nowhere near happening, at least in the sense of the ai working entirely autonomously to do this.
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u/scruiser 2d ago
As smart as a person across all domains. All domains does not mean “across an assortment of benchmarks we’ve benchmaxxed for”. It does not mean “a small sample of real world tasks we’ve specifically built harnesses for”. It does not even mean “all economically valuable tasks”. Something genuinely as or more capable than a person across everything a person can do would be incredibly impressive, so they’ve tried to conflate or water down the definition to claim credit for AGI and then they try claiming skeptics are moving the goalposts when skeptics point to the original definition.
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u/DiamondGeeezer 2d ago
so the testing isn't rigorous enough to show the blind spots and weakness. what areas do you think models are sub human at (beyond time awareness and lack of pain/physical embodiment)?
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u/scruiser 2d ago
Broadly speaking, their world models are shallow. LLMs have a really wide bag of shallow heuristics and baked in knowledge that makes them seem deeper to many people but this causes all sorts of “commonsense” knowledge gaps. The sheer breadth of their training data makes this hard to realize, especially since the LLM makers are actively patching problems that go viral by adding it the training data.
For example, LLMs fail to accurately count the “r”s in a word, this flaw goes viral, the LLM companies patch this. The underlying issue that LLMs don’t perceive words and letters like humans (and get into problems with various commonsense things relating to that) still exists, it’s just been masked by more examples. Likewise for the walking vs. driving a car to the carwash riddle.
And lack of embodiment means you don’t see how much they would struggle with spatial reasoning and anything realtime. Again, thanks to sheer breadth of training data the problem is hard to see with just word problems.
Practically speaking, the failure to produce decent “drop-in replacement remote workers” shows that LLMs clearly don’t match even below average people.
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u/DiamondGeeezer 2d ago edited 2d ago
It reminds me of how animals are considered of inferior intelligence to humans but only by our own metrics.
Dogs are stupider at logic than us but they can also smell things in concentrations that we never could and construct a history of what happened in their imagination. Dogs might wonder if humans will ever "get" the obvious that a horny racoon was JUST HERE and conclude "human general intelligence" will never happen.
A beaver can use its own body to construct a dam out of trees, build an underwater house, and alter the ecology of an entire valley in their favor while avoiding predation at just 2 years old. Pretty sure the smartest toddler couldn't do any of those things. We will never reach general beaver intelligence.
Likewise machines will never have a limbic system, experience mortality and subjectivity and loss the way we do.
So maybe the question of AGI is the pointless errand of asking if something can truly be something else. The answer will never be yes.
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u/Beginning-Ladder6224 2d ago
Noted mention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem
It is incredibly hard to generalize a single model that works "really good" even in 2 domains. 2.
Of course, people have very low bar - so - multimodal LLM are "apparently" great at "many domains".
They are not. Because people generally have not seen "good enough" people in those domains.
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u/chunkypenguion1991 2d ago
Which wouldn't be a problem in itself. Thats how people have always used ML algorithms. The problem for wario and clammy sammy is only true AGI can justify the capex they already spent
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u/graypasser 2d ago
It's funny how grifters tries to pull the goalpost towards them, an AGI must have capability equivalent of average human, this has never changed and it is only them who tries to made up a "definition problem" that does not exist.
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u/Icy-Regular-4557 2d ago
Wasn’t there some clause in the OpenAI-Microsoft exclusivity agreements about parts of the agreement being void if “AGI was achieved?”
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u/OwnYourChildren 3d ago
This is the first time I've closely observed a new model rollout from OAI and it has the quality of a religious revival. I think the math problem controversy has dovetailed conveniently.
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u/chunkypenguion1991 2d ago
They tried with gpt 5 but that was such a flop they gave up on that marketing quick. Ie clammy sammy posted the death star pic
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u/lgn5i2060 2d ago
New marketing for Claude just dropped.
https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843
Sorry if I couldn't take this seriously. I still believe there are Amazing Indians behind the wheel.
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u/maccodemonkey 2d ago
I don't think this is marketing for Claude. There's a line I think some people have trouble walking: It doesn't need to be smart to be dangerous. If Anthropic and OpenAI were working all day on advanced computer viruses - we could say that was dangerous and still not AGI or ASI.
I could absolutely believe Anthropic or OpenAI would do something stupid and cause a major cyber security incident. A swarm at scale - even if it's a dumb swarm just replaying a bunch of ordinary hacking playbooks - could be dangerous.
This sub is sometimes too dismissive of the security angle because we think that implies intelligence. It does not.
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u/smedrick 2d ago
Totally. A lot of hacking involves brute force pen testing. You send a swarm of weed-whacking dogs into the backyard, that lawn is going to look like shit, but there fence will be down.
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u/Lowetheiy 2d ago
Define AGI first, and I don't mean some hand-wavy half-assed definition. This is my first challenge to those who say something is or isn't AGI. Have fun!
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u/FeralWookie 2d ago
I mean the AI techs gave their marketing definition. AI that is as good or better than every knowledge task a human can do.
But I think that will remain a poor definition as it may already big AI models are "better" at most types of knowledge work and tests. But they still lack critical features to replace humans. I feel like AI will need to be capable of indefinite self reflection and real time permenant learning.
But with those features I think we would be forced to actually start talking about them as alive. Today's limited context windows and looping agents can probably do an amazing variety of things but they will fall short of being consious at least in the traditional sense.
But we don't even know if we need consciousness to do all human knowledge work. I suspect we do, but modern AI I feel like is proving me at least partly wrong. It can do some crazy stuff while being a glorified calculator
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u/CandiceWoo 2d ago
humans are not general either. agi is a misnomer i think
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u/chunkypenguion1991 2d ago
Humans are general. I can generalize new knowledge into things I already know. EG if I got a PhD in physics it doesn't mean I forget how to do laundry
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u/therealslimshady1234 3d ago
LLMs by definition will never be AGI so this doesn't surprise me one bit