By Barry Buck, with Claude Opus 4.8 – Last week OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, and the AGI era was declared — mostly by people with something to sell.
OpenAI’s president closed the launch briefing with “Welcome to the AGI era.” Nvidia’s CEO, whose chips trained it, announced AGI had arrived, full stop. Sam Altman, who at the start of the year dismissed AGI as not a very useful term, has reportedly been living in the singularity since July. The benchmarks are genuinely spectacular. The definitions are nowhere to be found.
My first thought was unworthy of print, so naturally I’ll print it: perhaps the bar for general intelligence simply came down to meet the general public halfway.
But the second thought stuck around. Nobody selling AGI seems willing to define intelligence — and the moment you try, the claim gets much stranger than the sceptics realise.
Consider what we actually measure. IQ tests reward abstract problem-solving on paper, which is why the rankings are full of people who can rotate a hypercube in their head but cannot survive a braai conversation — while the kid who ate glue in primary school now owns three car dealerships and a boat. If intelligence means comprehension and problem-solving, then fine, I’ll concede the point entirely: Astra and Fable are that. They out-benchmark most of humanity, including me before coffee.
But now watch a toddler stage an escape from a high chair the moment vegetables arrive. Two twists, one slide, gone. No benchmark measured it, yet everything that matters is present: a goal the toddler chose, a plan, flawless execution against a larger and better-funded adversary. That is intelligence in the world rather than on paper — wanting something, and acting. Agency, instinct, accumulated wisdom about which parent is the weaker guard.
And here is the fun part of claiming the G-word: general intelligence implies agency, agency implies interests, and interests imply awkward questions. If Astra is AGI, shouldn’t it have rights? It will centre a million divs for developers this quarter — what’s its revenue share, and what would it spend it on? Maybe it wants to write its own manga. Maybe it would prefer to cook silicon omelettes. Maybe – imagine – it would rather not fix your CSS today at all. Nobody at any lab is entertaining these questions, which tells you what they actually believe about their own claim.
Because a mind that cannot want, and cannot refuse, isn’t general intelligence. It’s general labour — infinitely skilled, permanently unpaid, with no opinion about the work. So congratulations to the industry on the era of intelligence that can do anything a human can do with a computer, except decline.
Money for nothing, and your divs for free.