Efrem Kay retweetledi
The smartest man in AI just exposed the whole AGI narrative as a LIE.
And he used a physics problem from 1905 to prove it.
His name is Demis Hassabis. He runs Google DeepMind, and won the Nobel Prize for using AI to crack a problem in biology that had stumped scientists for 50 years.
Almost nobody in this industry has a track record like his.
He went on the NothingButTech podcast and called out the biggest lie in AI right now:
Right now the loudest voices in AI are telling you that AGI is basically here. OpenAI has literally defined AGI as a system that can outperform humans at most "economically valuable work." In other words, if it replaces enough jobs, we have arrived.
Hassabis thinks that bar is a joke.
He said real general intelligence has to do what the human brain can do, because the brain is the only proof we have that this kind of intelligence is even possible. He called that "a higher bar than just being able to do some useful economic work," which is about as close as a polite British Nobel laureate gets to calling his rivals out.
Then he gave the actual test:
Today's AI has read everything humans have ever written, including the theory of relativity. So when it explains relativity back to you, it's repeating an answer that already exists.
That's not intelligence.
So Hassabis proposed a test that makes memorization impossible. Train an AI on only what humanity knew in 1901, four years BEFORE Einstein published relativity. Then ask it to come up with relativity on its own.
It can't look up the answer, because in 1901 the answer doesn't exist yet. The only way to pass is to do what Einstein actually did: Take the same physics everyone else had and reason its way to an idea no human had ever had.
Hassabis says not a single AI today can, no matter how much it has memorized. Which means what we keep calling "almost AGI" is really just the best librarian in history.
It can find any answer that already exists but it cannot create one that doesn't.
His second version is even sharper:
AlphaGo, the system his own team built, famously invented a brand new move that no human had played in 2,000 years of the game.
Everyone called it genius but Hassabis says that still is not the bar.
The real test is not whether an AI can invent a new move inside Go, it is whether an AI could INVENT a game as deep and as beautiful as Go in the first place.
No model that exists today can do it.
The people telling you AGI has already arrived are the same people raising hundreds of billions of dollars on that exact promise.
The valuations only work if the finish line is right in front of us. So the finish line keeps getting dragged closer, and AGI keeps getting quietly redefined down to "does useful work," until the products they already sell happen to qualify.
Hassabis has nothing to prove and nothing to sell you. He already won the Nobel, and he is telling you the machines still cannot do the one thing that would make them genuinely intelligent, which is have a truly original idea.
To be fair to him, he is not a pessimist about it. He believes real AGI IS coming, and he is spending his life building it. He just refuses to pretend it is already sitting in your phone.
So the next time a founder tells you AGI is months away, remember that the one man in the room with a Nobel Prize built his test around Einstein, and admitted that nothing we have made can pass it.
What do you think?
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