Is Gato Approaching an AGI?

Saw this mentioned.  Gato/DeepMind push us towards AGI ( Artificial General Intelligence)  Does not seem to be close as yet, but is it the right direction?   Still think no, not even close, but surely some experiments are under way.  Key will be preloading  contextual knowledge to provide what I would call intelligent insight.   If and when so, we will hear of it quickly.    What is a "Generalist AI" 

Is Gato a true AGI?  in Venturebeat.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is back in the news thanks to the recent introduction of Gato from DeepMind. As much as anything, AGI invokes images of the Skynet (of Terminator lore) that was originally designed as threat analysis software for the military, but it quickly came to see humanity as the enemy. While fictional, this should give us pause, especially as militaries around the world are pursuing AI-based weapons. 

However, Gato does not appear to raise any of these concerns. The deep learning transformer model is described as a “generalist agent” and purports to perform 604 distinct and mostly mundane tasks with varying modalities, observations and action specifications. It has been referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of AI models. It is clearly much more general than other AI systems developed thus far and in that regard appears to be a step towards AGI.   .... ' 

Deepmind Gato Applications

Thinking this and it application.

DeepMind Introduces Gato, A New Generalist AI Agent   in InfoQ

Gato, as the agent is known, is DeepMinds’s generalist AI that can perform many different tasks that humans can do, without carving a niche for itself as an expert on one task. Gato can perform more than 600 different tasks, such as playing video games, captioning images and moving real-world robotic arms. Gato is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy.

DeepMind is one of the most well-known AI companies dedicated to the advancement of artificial intelligence. With several programs, it aims to offer new ideas and improvements in machine learning, engineering, simulation, and computer infrastructure. The remarkable all-in-one machine learning kit has recently gained popularity in the worldwide tech market.

DeepMind says that Gato is trained on a large number of datasets comprising agent experience in both simulated and real-world environments, in addition to a variety of natural language and image datasets.

Gato, like all AI systems, learns by example, ingesting billions of words, images from real-world and simulated environments, button presses, joint torques and more in the form of tokens. These tokens served to represent data in a way Gato could understand, enabling the system to perform different tasks.

Gato's architecture isn't that different from many of the AI systems in use today. In the sense that it's a Transformer, it's similar to OpenAI's GPT-3. The Transformer has been the architecture of choice for complicated reasoning tasks, displaying abilities in summarizing texts, producing music, categorizing objects in photos, and analyzing protein sequences.

Even more remarkable, Gato has a parameter count that is orders of magnitude lower than single-task systems, including GPT-3. Parameters are system components learnt from training data that fundamentally describe the system's ability to solve a problem, such as text generation. GPT-3 has more than 170 billion, while Gato has only 1.2 billion. ... '