The AGI 'Valley': AI Tackles Riemann Hypothesis But Fails Basic Tasks
JacquesThibs · x · 2026-08-11
The author points out that whenever AI achieves a capability breakthrough, some accuse critics of "moving the goalposts." However, AI capability development is highly complex and uneven.
Taking the x-risk community as an example, many abilities predicted six or seven years ago—now demonstrated by today's LLMs—would have been classified as AGI or even superintelligence. Yet, on the path to superintelligence, we ended up in a weird "valley": AIs can make progress on highly difficult problems like the Riemann hypothesis, but they still cannot reliably perform other basic tasks. This breaks the previous linear assumption that an AI capable of coding would naturally excel at all foundational abilities.
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