Ferhad (Hâd) Erdogan

This Thursday, 6pm, Toni Antonova and me will organize a CIMC Salon at the Foresight node in Berlin! Please come if you are in town! luma.com/3ojjfb61

Demis Hassabis just made every AI benchmark on Earth irrelevant. Hassabis: “True creativity, continual learning, long-term planning. They’re not good at those things.” Three capabilities every human develops naturally. No AI system has achieved one. Hassabis: “They can get gold medals in international math olympiad questions, but they can still fall over on relatively simple math problems if you pose it in a certain way.” Gold medals and grade school failures from the same machine. That’s not intelligence with blind spots. That’s mimicry with peaks. Performance without comprehension. Hassabis: “My definition of AGI has never changed. A system that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities that humans can.” Not most. All. He proposed the only test that can’t be gamed. Hassabis: “Training an AI system with a knowledge cutoff of 1911 and seeing if it could come up with general relativity like Einstein did in 1915. That’s the true test of whether we have a full AGI system.” Give a machine everything humanity knew before Einstein’s breakthrough. Seal it off. See if it reaches what one mind reached alone. No benchmarks. No leaderboards. No curated evals. Just a mind against the unknown. Nothing passes that today. Hassabis: “The brain is the only existence proof we have, maybe in the universe, of a general intelligence.” One structure in the entire known universe has proven general intelligence is physically possible. One. And every lab on Earth is racing to build the second. Hassabis: “I think we’re still a few years away from that.” Not decades. A machine that passes that test doesn’t stop at physics. It runs that same process against every unsolved problem in every discipline. No fatigue. No lifespan. No ceiling. Einstein was one mind. One field. One lifetime. This would be a thousand Einsteins across every domain simultaneously. And it never dies. The greatest intellectual achievement in human history becomes the floor. The thing that made one man singular becomes the entry exam for a machine. That’s not artificial intelligence. That’s a different kind of mind. It’s years away. Not generations.

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.