We didn't move the AGI goalposts: the real missing piece is meta-learning
laoma1255 · reddit · 2026-09-08
A long Reddit essay rebuts the "moved goalposts" complaint about AGI: the issue is conflating accumulated skill with actual intelligence, echoing Chollet's ARC-AGI premise that intelligence is the sample efficiency of acquiring new skills on unfamiliar problems.
Key argument: human engineers are the model's "external meta-learner" — when a model fails a novel benchmark, humans analyze failures, build simulators, design curricula and generate targeted synthetic data, while the model just runs SGD on human-built scaffolding. This repeats the AlphaGo fallacy (trained on millions of games yet couldn't play on a 20x20 board without retraining). Brute-force curriculum design yields over-engineered specialists, not general learners. True AGI must close the loop itself: autonomous diagnosis of blind spots, autonomous curriculum/data generation, and self-directed skill acquisition — of which today's RSI efforts in coding/math loops are only primitive versions. Demanding this isn't moving goalposts; it was the definition of general intelligence from day one.
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