Getting closer to AGI? Google's NoteBookLM and Replit's AI Coding Agent

Putting "closer to AGI?" in a blog title might border on being clickbait, but I will argue that it is not! I have mostly earned my living in the field of AI since 1982 and I argue that the existence of better AI driven products and the accelerating rate of progress in research, that we are raising the bar on what we consider AGI to be.

I have had my mind blown twice in the last week:

Today I took the PDF for my book "Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming With Clojure (you can read it free online here) and used it to create a notebook in Google's NotebookLM and asked for a generated 8 minute podcast. This experimental app created a podcast with two people discussing my book accurately and showing wonderful knowledge of technology. If you want to listen to the audio track that Google's NotebookLM created, here is a link to the WAV audio file

Last week I signed up for a one year plan on Replit.com after trying the web based IDE for Haskell and Python coding. After using the platform for a few days I used its AI coding agent to rewrite my Clojure web app CookingSpace.com in Javascript, HTML, and CSS. I estimate that doing this by hand would have taken me at least 30 hours, and I had something written and publicly deployed in less than an hour. This process would have been quicker but initially I asked for features like user accounts that I later decided I didn't want so I had to iterate with the AI coding agent to remove working functionality.

Why claim these two well engineered products make me feel that we are closer to AGI?

To be fair what makes NotebookLM and Replit AI coding agent so impressive is the product design and infrastructure that uses LLMs under the hood. Still, it is very difficult to say that the functionality of both these systems is not now superior to most humans.

I feel that the argument over AI and AGI gets dragged down by discussions of sentient AI taking over the world of somehow controlling humans. The thing to worry about is how people use AI.

I find it difficult to view AI as anything but a set of advanced tools, something to augment human productivity. In my view, advanced AI driven tools and products are very close to what I would call AGI.

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