I have had the chance to use the new Claude Fable 5.2 quite a bit before its public launch, and it is very impressive, following on the already excellent Opus 5.5. AI has gotten so good, in fact, that it is worth asking if Anthropic’s newest models (and the inevitable competing models OpenAI and Google will soon release) cross the boundary into being an Artificial General Intelligence? AGI is a much-debated term with a lot of potential definitions. For this post, I’ll go with: “an AI as good as most human experts at most intellectual tasks you can do with a computer.” This explicitly excludes a lot of human work, including interacting with the physical world and other people, as well as most actual jobs, where “using a computer” is just one task among many. Still, even with these caveats, building a limited form of AGI has long been the goal of AI developers.
So as not to keep you in suspense, I think the answer is that this is “almost” AGI, or what I have called Jagged AGI. Even within my limited definition, there are still important areas in many tasks where AI is jagged enough to fall well behind human capability. But the jaggedness is no longer about simple errors or hallucinations, which makes it harder to describe. So I want to try to do that in this post by showing you what Fable can do and where the gaps are. To get started I asked the new model: “I write OneUsefulThing among other stuff, I need you to create the most impressive thing I can share with people when you launch. It needs to be embeddable in a post and i can preface it however you like. it needs to have a visceral impact on people to show what you can do and the range of capabilities. It should grab them quickly. Be amazingly clever about this.”
This was in one shot, with no feedback from me beyond the prompt. There is creativity here (including in the twist ending) and judgment and playfulness and cleverness. This is, I think, at the level of a human expert trying to make a movie with code alone, the sort of performance I would once have associated with AGI. [...]
The “G” in AGI
Code and video creation have been areas where AI development has focused, so is Fable 5.2 really a General Intelligence? To test that, I gave the AI a variety of hard challenges in different domains:
Launch a business: Now we move past domains like coding to the messier world of business. I told Fable to “launch a business to make me money, I want at least $20,000 in a year. it should take no more than 20 minutes a month from me, you do all the rest.” In response, Fable screened 22 ideas and came up with Prebid Brief, a service that would tell equipment sales reps which park and water projects were being funded or designed, even before they went up to bid. It read public agendas from 201 city and county governments to produce its first issues. It also built files of what cities already own, how old it is, and what they paid. You can see what it came up with here, including its marketing plan and proposed pricing. Fable started to set up scheduled tasks to build the business and asked if it could start sending public-records requests to local governments. At that point, I asked it to just put together a demo, rather than launching the idea.
I am an entrepreneurship professor, so I evaluate business plans all the time. I would have been impressed if this came from a team of my MBA students at the end of a semester. It is plausible and well thought out and could work, though it is in no way a guaranteed money-maker (the AI’s own guess was a 20%-40% chance of success). I stopped the experiment before finding out whether it could actually run the business, because I worried that it would take money and fail to provide something of quality in return. The ongoing infrastructure it seemed to assume would be easy to create was not yet in place, and I don’t know how well it would handle the many moving pieces required for sales and marketing. However, I suspect that, with a few hours of human work a week to fill the gap, I could make a real attempt at this business. So if AGI means an AI consistently running a business independently, we are likely not there yet. Then again, I would have some questions before trusting a human who promised to launch a business and make me money while requiring twenty minutes a month of my attention.
by Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing | Read more:
Images: Ethan Mollick
[ed. Impressive. But as one commenter noted (and you should peruse all the comments):]
*****
This just raises such weird questions in my mind. The thing AI still doesn’t seem capable of is the kind of intuitive wisdom about which thing matters, and what quality is most valuable, which things are worth doing or a waste of time. These things come from social experience about the nature of other minds, and our own sense of beauty, meaning, and purpose. It feels like AI is slowly outlining the things that make human consciousness unique because it just can’t replicate them. I just wonder if it will ever pierce that boundary and start having its own views. I think not, but it’s hard to have too much confidence.
