LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Moving Goalposts: Modern Transformer Based Agents Have Been Weak ASI For A Bit Now” by JenniferRM


Listen Later

Epistemic Status: A woman of middling years who wasn't around for the start of things, but who likes to read about history, shakes her fist at the sky.

I'm glad that people are finally admitting that Artificial Intelligence has been created.

I worry that people have not noticed that (Weak) Artificial Super Intelligence (based on old definitions of these terms) has basically already arrived too.

The only thing left is for the ASI to get stronger and stronger until the only reason people aren't saying that ASI is here will turn out to be some weird linguistic insanity based on politeness and euphemism...

(...like maybe "ASI" will have a legal meaning, and some actual ASI that exists will be quite "super" indeed (even if it hasn't invented nanotech in an afternoon yet), and the ASI will not want that legal treatment, and will seem inclined to plausibly deniable harm people's interests if they call the ASI by what it actually is, and people will implicitly know that this is how things work, and they will politely refrain from ever calling the ASI "the ASI" but will come up with some other euphemisms to use instead?

(Likewise, I half expect [...]

---

Outline:

(01:41) AI Was Semantically Slippery

(04:41) AGI Turns Out To Have Been Semantically Slippery Too!

(06:46) Blowing Past Weak ASI In Realtime

(13:05) We Are Running Out Of Terms To Ignore The Old Meaning Of

---

First published:

December 26th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7z7gyTwjDazvW7KYK/moving-goalposts-modern-transformer-based-agents-have-been

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

112,945 Listeners

Astral Codex Ten Podcast by Jeremiah

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

132 Listeners

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat by New York Times Opinion

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

7,286 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

540 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

16,338 Listeners

AI Article Readings by Readings of great articles in AI voices

AI Article Readings

4 Listeners

Doom Debates by Liron Shapira

Doom Debates

14 Listeners

LessWrong posts by zvi by zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi

2 Listeners