About whether video games or language understanding are the path to AGI.
Has this happened?
Yes 90 (59%)Not sure 40 (26%)No 22 (14%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether video games or language understanding are the path to AGI.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I don't disagree that video games are a very useful benchmark to evaluate intelligence. But I don't think AGI will evolve from video games. I think that language understanding is the path to AGI.
Language is quite complex and can't easily be beaten by hard coded algorithms or simple statistics. You can do some tasks with those things, but others they will fail entirely. The closer you get to passing a true turing test, the harder the problem becomes. It certainly requires human intelligence, and most of our intelligence is deeply rooted in language.
He mentioned games like Skyrim and Civilization as being end goals. But even a human that doesn't speak English wouldn't be able to play those games. Let alone an alien that knew nothing about our world, or even our universe.