About how to describe AI progress clearly without the vague term AGI.
Has this happened?
Yes 17 (15%)Not sure 12 (11%)No 81 (74%)
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 how to describe AI progress clearly without the vague term AGI.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
There is the term "narrow AI" which is usually used for specialized systems like visual detection, etc., and I personally think that what we still have is narrow AI but we now have it for language and recently for video. I also think even if all of these modalities are stitched together it is still narrow AI... so at what point does it become AGI? I think it becomes AGI when the system understands the world in the same way that humans do, and also demonstrates human level agency. So you would have a system that can maintain itself... it changes its own batteries, it fixes its own bugs (to some extent, not absolutely), and it understands the world of humans such that it can engage in the world without supervision. Until then, I think we'll just have really, really good narrow AI or systems of narrow AI.