As AI models achieve previously defined benchmarks for intelligence (e.g., reasoning), their failure to generate transformative economic value reveals those benchmarks were insufficient. This justifies 'shifting the goalposts' for AGI. It is a rational response to realizing our understanding of intelligence was too narrow. Progress in impressiveness doesn't equate to progress in usefulness.

Dr. Vijoy Pandey defines ASI with two concrete benchmarks: 1) an AI system performing 100% of a human task autonomously (economic viability), and 2) an AI inventing novel ideas beyond its training data without human help (technical viability).

Dan Shipper proposes a practical, economic definition for AGI that sidesteps philosophical debates. We will have AGI when AI agents are so capable at continuous learning, memory management, and proactive work that the cognitive and economic cost of restarting them for each task outweighs the benefit of turning them off.

The key to AI's economic disruption is its "task horizon"—how long an agent can work autonomously before failing. This metric is reportedly doubling every 4-7 months. As the horizon extends from minutes (code completion) to hours (module refactoring) and eventually days (full audits), AI agents unlock progressively larger portions of the information work economy.

A practical definition of AGI is an AI that operates autonomously and persistently without continuous human intervention. Like a child gaining independence, it would manage its own goals and learn over long periods—a capability far beyond today's models that require constant prompting to function.

Benchmarks like GDPVal show models like GPT-4 consistently outperform human experts on professional tasks, meeting the practical definition of AGI for knowledge work. The public discourse, however, has prematurely shifted the goalposts to sci-fi concepts of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), obscuring the revolution already underway.

Moving away from abstract definitions, Sequoia Capital's Pat Grady and Sonia Huang propose a functional definition of AGI: the ability to figure things out. This involves combining baseline knowledge (pre-training) with reasoning and the capacity to iterate over long horizons to solve a problem without a predefined script, as seen in emerging coding agents.

Cutting through abstract definitions, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo offers a practical benchmark for AGI: an AI that can perform any job a typical human can do remotely. This anchors the concept to tangible economic impact, providing a more useful milestone than philosophical debates on consciousness.

A useful mental model for AGI is child development. Just as a child can be left unsupervised for progressively longer periods, AI agents are seeing their autonomous runtimes increase. AGI arrives when it becomes economically profitable to let an AI work continuously without supervision, much like an independent adult.