If you define AGI as "can do the work of a human sitting at a computer, end to end", then I'd say comparing yourself to it on a specific skill is the wrong test. Can you hand it a role and walk away for a day/week/month?
I can’t yet. I think that I'd want at least two things it doesn't have: the ability to retain what it learned yesterday (without me carrying it in the context window and thus micromanaging it), and the ability to prioritize correctly, i.e. tell which of the n things it could do next is the one that actually matters.
Can't say for sure that those are enough, but not having them seems to be most of why I still have to "babysit" these incredible tools.
I think fundamentally it is that. The ability to retain information.
Like given a specific task it can do a thing amazingly well, but can it recall a thing. Its memory seems like a giant filing cabinet and it has to go scan like 20 million tokens worth of memory to recover things previously talked about.
Human memory is more graph like, we don’t recall things exactly, but one thing links to another, we create a pattern of a thing, we mark what is important, and overtime what was important degrades or becomes less so.
I feel like what makes it lack intelligence is it never seems to learn. Like it kind of does, but then doesn’t persist once too many other things are learned.
I’m sure they’re probably working on this, but I feel like that is what I want far more than even better models, is a better memory system to recall and forget things that the models work on.
To be fair, I think you can't hand a role over to someone you just hired and walk away for a week. No matter how much of a SME they are. Let's not forget human onboarding takes months. With the advantage of their knowledge not going into the void multiple times a day. That's likely the last missing piece, a solid system of memories that produces the same effect as short/long term memories in a person.
I agree, we're not at that kind of long horizon capability yet. You still need a human in the loop to do manual testing. For whatever reason, we managed to automate the skill before we managed to automate the focus.
So, for now, humans need to stay in the loop and do low skilled labor to keep the skilled work the models do from going off the rails.
Fans stop cooling at 35 degrees wet bulb. For comparison the most extreme wet bulb temp that hit London in summer 2026 was 26 degrees according to met office. (I can't find other peak 2026 wet bulb temps in europe, feel free to contribute)
IME, based on an in-house bench it's still good to about 20% on the 1M for 4.6 and 4.7 with a code base >50k loc. The trick I used before switching providers was to have it write a handoff when it hit ~18% of context and reset.
There are also many people running 4.5 with specific parameters that claim to be having luck.
Yeah, I realize that's more correct. I also realized when someone else downthread bastardized it into synthropologist that the podes part has entirely to do with feet and nothing to do with beings, necessarily. Anthro- -podes is more what I had in mind, not as a pluralization of anthropos.
So unless the AI has feet you wouldn't study Synthetipology.
But since when is there a synthetos? Since right now, I guess. Shrug But you know it's from the same root as thesis, and synthesis (or a more proper ancient Greek spelling) is the noun and doesn't end in -os.
Fair warning: I’m quite ignorant in terms of economics, so this is a naïve way of looking at it.
The question that always pops up for me when it comes to UBI applied to the current capitalist system: even if you did actually come up with the money somehow (which is a pretty huge if as you say), once everyone has X “base money” per month, doesn’t that mean the cost of living (specifically renting) will rise to match this new “base”?
The cost of living would certainly rise somewhat but the point is that UBI is redistributive: the same absolute amount to everyone raises low incomes by a larger percentage than high incomes. Long term effects are hard to predict but in the short term it would mean the poor doing slightly better while the middle class is slightly worse off. The non-working (owning) class would be mostly unaffected as assets are insulated from inflation.
Another factor to consider is that putting more money in the hands of people in need of <thing> means producing <thing> becomes more profitable and thus more investment and resources are directed towards <thing>. If we assume the economy works the way the proponents of capitalism say it does, this should eventually drive the cost of living back down.
But personally I think the biggest benefit of UBI would be the reduction in number of people who are desperate enough to accept work – both legal and illegal – that is unfairly compensated, inhumane and/or immoral. The existence of that class of people is the driving force behind many societal problems. Exorbitant amounts of resources are wasted treating the symptoms of those problems instead of fixing the root cause.
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