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Game over. AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there.
(garymarcus.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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I’ve been worried about this since around 2016 - long before I’d ever heard of LLMs or Sam Altman. The way I see it, intelligence is just information processing done in a certain way. We already have narrowly intelligent AI systems performing tasks we used to consider uniquely human - playing chess, driving cars, generating natural-sounding language. What we don’t yet have is a system that can do all of those things.
And the thing is, the system I’m worried about wouldn’t even need to be vastly more intelligent than us. A “human-level” AGI would already be able to process information so much faster than we can that it would effectively be superintelligent. I think that at the very least, even if someone doubts the feasibility of developing such a system, they should still be able to see how dangerous it would be if we actually did stumble upon it - however unlikely that might seem. That’s what I’m worried about.
Yeah see I don't agree with that base premise, that it's as simple as information processing. I think sentience - and, therefore, intelligence - is a more holistic process that requires many more tightly-coupled external feedback loops and an embedding of the processes in a way that makes the processing analogous to the world as modelled. But who can say, eh?
It’s not obvious to me that sentience has to come along for the ride. It’s perfectly conceivable that there’s nothing it’s like to be a superintelligent AGI system. What I’ve been talking about this whole time is intelligence — not sentience, or what I’d call consciousness.