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Interesting Times · Geopolitics & World Affairs · October 2026
Tyler Cowen asked Patel what he means by AGI. Patel says he means AI that can do any job end to end, and that today's models are still far from it. Their inability to learn on the job is one of the main limitations he sees.
I think the biggest thing is that we have people are thinking too much about current LLM systems as AGI.
When you say AGI, artificial general intelligence, what do you mean?
…they're often described as AGI. AGI, I mean, as AIs that can do any end-to-end. Job that humans can do, all the cognitive work. In my opinion, we're far from AGI. And I've been articulating or trying to articulate for the last year or two the kinds of cognitive limitations these systems have, which make them far inferior to humans at most jobs, even most jobs that can be done over a computer. People often note that interns are not that useful. They need many months of experience before they are useful to the company. And these AI systems are in a position where they are beginning every single session as if this is their first day on the job. So this is one important missing limitation. There are many others that these AI systems have, but we have been cracking through countless half a dozen other limitations that AIs have over the last five, 10 years. Five years ago, AIs couldn't add two plus two, right? Now they're solving Navier-Stokes. And so I think that as we keep going through these limitations, people should expect systems…
So some of the things they can't do well, such as long-range planning or certain kinds of memory, when do you feel it will be in place that, in fact, they're excellent at those two?
It is kind of a question about, well, if we knew how to solve it, we would have solved it already. And if you don't know how to solve it, you can't exactly predict when it will happen. But if somebody made me bet, I'd say within the next one to three years.
So we're at a time in October 2026. The Hugging Face incident is not that far behind us. There have been many other hacks. A large number of math problems were recently solved coming out of OpenAI. Some well-known people resigned from OpenAI and Anthropic, saying they don't feel it's really…