Simon Willison’s Weblog

AGI is here! When exactly it arrived, we’ll never know; whether it was one company’s Pro or another company’s Pro Max (Eddie Bauer Edition) that tip-toed first across the line … you may debate. But generality has been achieved, & now we can proceed to new questions. [...]

The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a particular purpose. Consider landmark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these systems were all different, but all alike in this way.

Language models were trained for a purpose, too … but, surprise: the mechanism & scale of that training did something new: opened a wormhole, through which a vast field of action & response could be reached. Towering libraries of human writing, drawn together across time & space, all the dumb reasons for it … that’s rich fuel, if you can hold it all in your head.

— Robin Sloan, AGI is here (and I feel fine)