Are We Near AGI?

It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in tech circles. AGI. Artificial General Intelligence. It doesn’t sound like much, to the lay person. It sounds generic. But the real meaning of AGI is highly controversial, and, to some, quite disturbing. It’s the idea that soon, AI will be good at everything.

It’s a compelling idea, but in real life, many experts believe the whole thing is much more nuanced.

I like to cite the example of the “jagged frontier,” a phrase coined by former MIT prof Ethan Mollick, who uses it to suggest that AGI doesn’t become AGI all at once.

“Imagine a fortress wall, with some towers and battlements jutting out into the countryside, while others fold back towards the center of the castle,” Mollick writes, in a 2023 blog post that illustrates this visually. “That wall is the capability of AI, and the further from the center, the harder the task. Everything inside the wall can be done by the AI, everything outside is hard for the AI to do. The problem is that the wall is invisible, so some tasks that might logically seem to be the same distance away from the center, and therefore equally difficult – say, writing a sonnet and an exactly 50-word poem – are actually on different sides of the wall. The AI is great at the sonnet, but, because of how it conceptualizes the world in tokens, rather than words, it consistently produces poems of more or less than 50 words. Similarly, some unexpected tasks (like idea generation) are easy for AIs, while other tasks that seem to be easy for machines to do (like basic math) are challenges for LLMs.”

Ramesh Raskar, who teaches courses at MIT, also has this notion of AI as, well, a many-splendored thing, with various degrees of splendor. Raskar sat down with pro journalist Nina Gregory to discuss this in detail.

The Convo in Mountain View

“I think everybody knows that there’s just an investor pitch deck called AGI,” Raskar said. “There’s no such thing.”