It's quite possible that the models from different companies are clustering together now because we're at a plateau point in model development, and won't see much in terms in further advances until we make the next significant breakthrough.
I don't think this has anything to do with AGI. We aren't at AGI yet. We may be close or we may be a very long way away from AGI. Either way, current models are at a plateau and all the big players have more or less caught up with each other.
As is, AI is quite intelligent, in that it can process large quantities of diverse unstructured information and build meaningful insights. And that intelligence applies across an incredibly broad set of problems and contexts. Enough that I have a hard time not calling it general. Sure, it has major flaws that are obvious to us and it's much worse at many things we care about. But that's doesn't make it not intelligent or general. If we want to set human intelligence as the baseline, we already have a word for that: superintelligence.
Is Casio calculator intelligent? Because it can also be turned on, assigned an input, produce output, and turn off. Just like any existing LLM program. What is the big difference between them in regard of "intelligence", if the only criteria is a difficulty with which same task may be performed by a human? Maybe producing computationally intensive outputs is not a sole sign of intelligence?
> If we want to set human intelligence as the baseline, we already have a word for that: superintelligence.
Superintelligence implies its above human level, not at human level. General intelligence implies it can do what humans can do in general, and not just replace a few of the things humans can do.
while the model companies all compete on the same benchmarks it seems likely their models will all converge towards similar outcomes unless something really unexpected happens in model space around those limit points…
I don't think this has anything to do with AGI. We aren't at AGI yet. We may be close or we may be a very long way away from AGI. Either way, current models are at a plateau and all the big players have more or less caught up with each other.