In a call with reporters announcing GPT-6 Astra, Greg Brockman talked about whether Astra qualifies as AGI:
I do leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them. For me personally, I do think we’re there.
As we reach AGI, whether it’s with Astra or a future model, I’d like to set some ground rules for myself — beliefs that won’t change as technology changes. I don’t believe that AI can have consciousness. Ever. AI will be smarter than us, but consciousness and “a soul” can’t be created from computation.
When a chatbot says something that gives the impression of having feelings, it’s just us projecting human traits onto the AI. My wife and I also named our robot vacuum. That doesn’t give it sentience.
AI cannot love. It cannot feel joy, heartache, and despair. AI may be able to say something kind to a friend who is hurting, but it cannot care that the friend is hurting. It’s these limits of AI that will reveal what humans are uniquely suited for. What we should focus our lives on.
For every task that AI can do that “replaces” an aspect of our own work, there will be something deeper and more important to work on.
I’m a programmer. In a single year, AI went from being useful in helping me code to now writing better code than I can write myself. And yet I have no shortage of things to work on, to plan, to shape, to ship.
AI might be able to write, but it has no childhood to remember, no person it misses, no mistakes it regrets. It doesn’t have experiences to turn into a story. AI might be able to paint, but it can’t put its passion into a work of art. It has nothing inside itself that needs to be expressed, nothing that can resonate because it comes from human experience.
Some people fear what AI will obsolete. I welcome it. If an AI can do something better than I can, then maybe that wasn’t the part of the work I was supposed to be holding on to.
I realize that this framing is a luxury not everyone has, especially someone who was laid off by a company squeezing higher profits out of automation. Even though my career has been completely upended by AI, I see a clear path forward. For others, that path may be rougher, more obscured, although I hope they find it.
The things that will provide the most meaning in our lives are the things that get us closest to humanity, to love, to heartache, to joy. As intelligence becomes abundant, we can choose to set aside the tasks that are easily replaced, and I think we’ll be left with more meaning and a deeper connection with others. When we reach AGI, let’s look for what it means that some things won’t change.
