Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2026 March0xbadcafebee

About whether tool-calling LLMs that fetch their own context amount to AGI.

It still can't learn. It would need to create content, experiment with it, make observations, then re-train its model on that observation, and repeat that indefinitely at full speed. That won't work on a timescale useful to a human. Reinforcement learning, on the other hand, can do that, on a human timescale. But you can't make money quickly from it. So we're hyper-tweaking LLMs to make them more useful faster, in the hopes that that will make us more money. Which it does. But it doesn't make you an AGI.

An AI keeps learning by experimenting, observing results, and retraining its own model on them, fast enough to be useful.

Has this happened?

Yes 8 (8%)Not sure 22 (21%)No 73 (71%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.