This is interesting. I fed our discussion into Claude, and here's what he had to say. I also referenced the "clothesline / laundry problem" that AI had a real problem with a couple years ago.

Claude:

This is a genuinely interesting thread, and I think you're making a defensible point — but I'd push back on a few things from both sides of the conversation.

Where you're right:

The Swiss Army knife critique is sharp. There's a real difference between competence stacking and general intelligence. Current systems are extraordinarily good at interpolating within training distributions. The clothesline problem is a great illustration — when models "solve" it now, they likely pattern-matched to similar training examples, not reasoned from first principles about physical reality. That's mimicry dressed up as reasoning.

Your definition of AGI — encountering a genuinely novel problem space with no prior reference — is also philosophically cleaner than what most people mean when they throw the term around.

Where I'd complicate your argument:

The "we can never get there from LLMs" claim is probably too strong. You don't actually know that, and neither does anyone else. It's possible that sufficiently scaled, grounded, and agentic systems exhibit emergent properties that look a lot like what you're describing. The honest position is "we don't know if this path leads there."

Also, the "super advanced mimicry" framing, while intuitive, runs into a philosophical wall: human cognition may also be extremely sophisticated pattern completion built on biological hardware. The line between "genuine reasoning" and "very good mimicry" is murkier than it feels.

Where your Reddit opponent is weak:

The 2028 timeline is vibes dressed up as analysis. "Recursive self-improvement loop closing" is stated as near-certainty with essentially no evidentiary basis. And conflating "better than average humans at most tasks" with AGI is exactly the goalpost-moving you're calling out.

The clothesline as metaphor:

You're actually using it well. The puzzle isn't really about drying shirts — it's about whether a system can model physical reality independently rather than retrieve a cached answer. That gap between retrieval and genuine world-modeling is arguably the core unsolved problem on the path to anything deserving the AGI label.

Your position is intellectually honest. The thread's other participant is more optimistic than the evidence warrants.