For me, the bar is not high. If you can just replace the knowledge worker that is lower than 1 standard deviation less than the mean worker, that will be enough for me to say that it is General AI. What is a good test for this?:
In under 4 hours can you have a program where I write something like a very detailed email (maybe I spend 10 minutes trying to craft the email) where I give a direct link to an internal file folder where there is a .pdf file and a .xlsx file. Each file contains names and birthdates amoung other things. I need the program to combine the data in these files and output it to .xlsx for me, giving me a list of names and birthdates from each file, combined in some sort of coherent manner that I can make sense of.
If you can get a program to do something like that via a detailed email-like directive before lunch, not a bunch of python that constantly breaks every 6 months, that's beating about 30% of the workforce and might as well be General AI.
You will get a system that can do specifically that or very very similar tasks given a carefully worded email which amounts to an English like programming language created by people that cost an order of magnitude more than the people that would have massaged the data into a spreadsheet.
This is actually probably a decent idea but it wouldn't be anything like general AI this year or next.
I agree totally. But I hope you get the drift here. To get to a GAI system, it has to be something like the test provided. You have to go into detail, but it's not something that you'd have to hard code either.
If I wanted the GAI to take in .docx files, or just first names, or to hop over to another directory and find things there, it should be able to do those things too. Basically, think of a task that you would give to a not-too-bright nephew that is in the firm for a summer internship. You'd need to give very clear instructions, but you should be able to coax him into getting some of the busy work done for you.
Anybody who's worked in an office knows that people that ask for things don't give sufficient, consistent, or logical instructions, because otherwise they would be programmers. Also, they just don't know what they want, at least at first. In some places, things are regimented so requests are made formally and kicked back if they are inadequate. But ordinarily people who work in the same office engage in dialogue, and knowing what questions to ask is orders of magnitude harder than processing the surface meaning of the original instructions. Even for a bright person with a lifetime of experience, I don't think it's unreasonable to take a few months to grasp how a business works, and think of how much data that would represent for an AI.
This Jakob Nielsen article is 5+ years old now, but it tends to suggest that someone who could complete that task is actually one standard deviation above average, rather than below: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
In under 4 hours can you have a program where I write something like a very detailed email (maybe I spend 10 minutes trying to craft the email) where I give a direct link to an internal file folder where there is a .pdf file and a .xlsx file. Each file contains names and birthdates amoung other things. I need the program to combine the data in these files and output it to .xlsx for me, giving me a list of names and birthdates from each file, combined in some sort of coherent manner that I can make sense of.
If you can get a program to do something like that via a detailed email-like directive before lunch, not a bunch of python that constantly breaks every 6 months, that's beating about 30% of the workforce and might as well be General AI.