AGI Has Been Achieved Internally

It was cryptic and called out as bullshit when “Jimmy Apples” tweeted it out on September 18th. It was shocking, for good or bad, when Sam Altman echoed it in a Reddit comment a week later. And it ended in a funny joke when he edited it to reveal he was just “memeing”.

Well, we don’t really know. In part because we don’t have a consensual conceptualization for the term “AGI” (although true and important, this reason is boring). In part because Altman’s company has become so close that the name “OpenAI” is a meme itself. And in part because we don’t have the means to assess whether something is or not an AGI — Schrodinger’s cat has been replaced and we don’t know how to open the box.

Yet that sentence — one more time, for effect; “AGI has been achieved internally” — regardless of its epistemic status, is a powerful one.

At least coming out of the right mouth. If I say it, no one cares. Reasonably. That anon account, Jimmy Apples said it, and although some people gave it a >0 credibility for having previously predicted GPT-4’s release date and mentioned Gobi months before The Information reported on it, most simply didn’t believe him (?) and the word never transcended.

Here