AGI is here (and I feel fine)

Summary

Transmitted 20260104 · · · 405 days before impact I pro­pose to begin this year with an acknowl­edg­ment that is strategic but/and also sin­cere. I’ll make my sin­cere case first, then explain its strategic logic. 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. What do I mean by AGI ? Many com­peting def­i­n­i­tions depend on words that them­selves have com­peting def­i­n­i­tions; these words include “valuable”, “work”, & “human”. Jas­mine Sun’s 2025 survey of AGI inter­pre­ta­tions is required reading on this subject, & not only for her immortal line … AI dis­cov­ered wholly new pro­teins before it could count the ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’, which makes it nei­ther vapor­ware nor a demigod but a secret third thing. … yet in the end Jas­mine leaves the ques­tion open, & I’d prefer to close it. The trick is to read plainly. 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. It’s impor­tant to empha­size that the open-ended capa­bility of these big models was a gen­uine sur­prise, even to their custodians. Once understood, the oppor­tu­nity was quickly grasped … but the mag­ni­tude of that...