Nathaniel Whittemore

And the short answer is, it's the exact same reason that we had that entire conversation on the show yesterday, which is that all of a sudden, progress towards AGI is going to be considered a meaningful factor when it comes to how markets should treat AI stocks.

Given how much AI stocks are at the core of the entire economy right now, these otherwise nebulous definitions start to take on a greater importance.

Now, of course, for those who haven't listened to yesterday's episode, AGI timelines are back in the news this week, specifically because OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy said that he believes the technology is still a decade away, as opposed to estimates that have it more in a year or two.

Now, one critical point that came out of that conversation is that Andre actually has an extremely high bar for how he defines AGI.

He said, when people talk about AI in the original AGI and how we spoke about it when OpenAI started, AGI was a system that you could go to that could do any economically valuable task at human performance or better.

That was the definition.

He noted that since then, the definition has been watered down to just covering knowledge work, certainly nothing like physical work.

Now, knowledge work is certainly a huge part of the global economy, but at 10 to 20% of all the work in the world, at least as per his estimates, that leaves a lot off the table.

Now, this is far from the only definition floating around.

Way back in February of 2023, OpenAI laid out their framework for thinking about the approach of AGI.

They gave a very basic definition, AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.

Since then, Sam Altman has updated his thoughts.

He acknowledged in February of this year that AGI is a, quote, weekly defined term, but generally speaking, we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems at human level in many fields.

You might also hear Altman talking about AGI in reference to the five levels of AI framework.

Now, this built off of something that Google DeepMind scientists had introduced in a November 2023 paper, but then OpenAI expanded into these five stages.

Level one, chatbots, which were AI with conversational language.

Level two, which were reasoners with human-level problem solving.

Level three was agents with systems that can take actions.

Level four were innovators, AI that can aid in invention.

Level five, organizations, or AI that can do the work of an organization.