It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so.
I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure.
Add into the mix that there are reports of people developing psychological disorders when exposed deeply to LLMs, I'm not sure they are good replacements for therapists (ELIZA, ah, what a thought), and they seem - even with a lot of investment in agentic workflows and getting a lot of context into GraphRAG or wiring up MCP - to be good at helping experts get a bit faster, not replace experts. And that's not software development specific - it seems to be the case across all domains of expertise.
So what are we now chasing for? What's the test for AGI?
It's definitely not playing games well, like we thought, or pretending to be human, or even being useful to a human. What is it, then?
If you look at the stuff Turing was writing in the 1950s its fascinating because he really saw the potential of what computation was going to be able to do. There was a paradigm shift in thinking about possibilities here that he grasped in the very early days.
I remember an interview with Kasparov. He said something, I don't remember exactly... It was something like "The skills chess develops are very important for... playing chess"; as a way to say "if you're good in chess, that doesn't mean you're particularly smart or good in other areas too".
As someone who played chess competitively in my childhood and teens, chess helped me a lot about concentration, problem solving and decision taking. I also learned to win and lose and to have respect for other people due to the competition.
As a teacher in my adulthood, I was extremely impressed by knowing a high rated player that was very weak student, especially in logic.
I now agree deeply with Kasparov about the importance of the skills chess develops.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] threadI thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure.
Add into the mix that there are reports of people developing psychological disorders when exposed deeply to LLMs, I'm not sure they are good replacements for therapists (ELIZA, ah, what a thought), and they seem - even with a lot of investment in agentic workflows and getting a lot of context into GraphRAG or wiring up MCP - to be good at helping experts get a bit faster, not replace experts. And that's not software development specific - it seems to be the case across all domains of expertise.
So what are we now chasing for? What's the test for AGI?
It's definitely not playing games well, like we thought, or pretending to be human, or even being useful to a human. What is it, then?
https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_a...
It would be amazing to go and fetch Turing with a time machine and bring him to our time. Show him an iPhone, his face on the UK £50 note, and Wikipedia's list of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBTQ_heads_of_...
As someone who played chess competitively in my childhood and teens, chess helped me a lot about concentration, problem solving and decision taking. I also learned to win and lose and to have respect for other people due to the competition.
As a teacher in my adulthood, I was extremely impressed by knowing a high rated player that was very weak student, especially in logic.
I now agree deeply with Kasparov about the importance of the skills chess develops.