Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
KR Kevin Roose Kevin Roose Technology journalist and author covering AI and the labs building it, and a former New York Times technology columnist.

“I think if you took any of today's models back in a time machine to 2017 and let the researchers from that period play around with them and then ask them, like, is this AGI? They would have said, oh, yes, obviously.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“I think if you took any of today's models back in a time machine to 2017 and let the researchers from that period play around with them and then ask them, like, is this AGI? They would have said, oh, yes, obviously.” — Kevin Roose, The Vergecast

Context

David Pierce asked whether we have reached AGI. Roose said his bar is lower than most: today's systems are about as trustworthy as a random stranger for a factual question or a work task. Pierce called this time-machine test the best definition he'd heard.

Transcript

The Vergecast Around 39:01 into the episode
Kevin Roose

…pick out of a bar with factual question, with a task at work. I think, you know, many people have higher bars than that. Demis Asabas famously thinks it's like not AGI until it can rediscover Einstein's theory of relativity from first principles using only the available science in 1911. I do like

David Pierce

…of random test for what is AGI. The one that's like, you have to grab a passage from the Bible and apply it to some theorem that it's like, okay, so what it actually turns out is, and asking, have we reached AGI is a trick question because the answer is AGI is meaningless. It's in the eye of the

Kevin Roose

beholder. But look, I think if you took any of today's models back in a time machine to 2017 and let the researchers from that period play around with them and then ask them, like, is this AGI? They would have said, oh, yes, obviously.

David Pierce

That's actually the best definition of AGI I've heard yet is the people who like Ilya Sutzkover is kind of the beginning and end of the book and is one of those people who is like, I thought this was going to be the thing and it turns out it's the thing. Holy crap. Like maybe that's as good a…

Kevin Roose

The time machine definition. You're free to steal that.

David Pierce

I like it. I like it. Yeah, we're going to cut this out. Do you think we've reached AGI? By that definition, sure. I think, do I believe we've built the thing that will be the end of humanity? No. Do I think we've built some like really cool tools that will change the way a lot of people work and…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Vergecast