You won't be able to read this without a subscription and I can't figure out how to find an archive link to something published in 1958: https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-device-.... The important quote, however, is:
> The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language, it was predicted.
They were talking about the very first perceptron, a hardware implementation funded by the Navy and built by a team led by Frank Rosenblatt, one of the earlier evangelists of neural nets, in 1957. The terminology "AGI" hadn't come into use yet that I'm aware of, as "AI" in itself meant the same thing back then, but in order to be able to call inferior, more limited software capabilities "AI" for marketing purposes, we had to invent "AGI" as the stronger concept. I'm guessing they expected it to happen sooner than 75 years later, though.
"Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans.
But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).
Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...
> I don't see copyright holders lying down for one else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not exist.
I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the extent that it does have implications, it isn't going anywhere.
But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes, and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen. Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their survival, mere LLMs even as they exist right now are economically relevant, so this isn't going to be a one-sided fight by just copyright holders.