GPT-4(o) lacks the ability to connect to any of the tools needed to achieve what I'm describing. Sure, it maybe could give instructions about how this could be done, but it can't actually do it. It can't send an email to your email account, and it can't check your incoming emails to see if any arrived asking for a meeting. It can't then check your calendar, and propose another email, or book a time if the time is available. It doesn't know that you normally take your lunch at some time, so that even though the spot is free, you wouldn't want a meeting at that time. And even if you did take the considerable amount of effort to hook it up with all of these systems, it's failure rate is still far too high to rely on it for such a thing.
And getting it to actually buy stuff like plane tickets on your behalf would be entirely crazy.
Sure, it can be made to do some parts of this for very narrowly defined scenarios, like the specific platform of a single three day conference. But it's nowhere near good enough for dealing with the general case of the messy general world.
I had a (human) assistant in my previous business, super-smart MBA type, and by your definition she wasn't a general intelligence on the day of onboarding:
- she didn't have access to my email account or calendar
- she didn't know my usual lunch time hours
- she didn't have a company card yet.
All of those points you're raising are logistics, not intelligence.
Intelligence is "When trying to achieve a goal, can you conceive of a plan to get there despite adverse conditions, by understanding them and charting/reviewing a sequence of actions".
You can definitely be an intelligent entity without hands or tools.
I'm pretty certain your assistant learned to do all of those things more or less on her own. Of course, you shared your schedule and email with them, and similarly, you'd have to share your schedule and email with an AGI.
But you certainly didn't have to write a special program for your assistant to integrate with your inbox, they just used an existing email/calendar client and looked at their screen.
GPT-4 is nowhere near able to interact with, say, the Gmail web page at this level. And even if you created the proper integrations, it's nowhere near the level that it could read all incoming email and intelligently decide, with high accuracy, which emails necessitate updates to your calendar, which don't, and which necessitate back-and-forth discussions to negotiate a better date for you.
Sure, your assistant didn't know all of this on day one, but they learned how to do it on their own, presumably with a few dozen examples at most. That is the mark of a general intelligence.
I think we're disagreeing on the current capacity of models, as much as we're disagreeing about the definition of AGI.
I'm pretty sure, from previous interactions with GPT-4o and from their demos, that if you used their desktop app (which enables screensharing) and asked it to tell you where to click, step-by-step, in the Gmail web page, it would be able to do a pretty good job of navigating through it.
Let's remember that the Gmail UI is one of the most heavily documented (in blogs, FAQs, support pages, etc) in the world. I can't see GPT-4o having any difficulty locating elements in there.
I think the intelligence part is to think of any potential logistical obstacles and figure out ways to deal with them with minimal disruption except when necessary because of potential conflicts with other goals.
> Sure, it maybe could give instructions about how this could be done [...]
If you were in a room with no computer, would you consider yourself to be not intelligent enough to send an email? Does the tooling you have access to change your level of intelligence?
And getting it to actually buy stuff like plane tickets on your behalf would be entirely crazy.
Sure, it can be made to do some parts of this for very narrowly defined scenarios, like the specific platform of a single three day conference. But it's nowhere near good enough for dealing with the general case of the messy general world.