Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is an established field of research. Yet Melanie Mitchell and others have questioned if the term still has meaning. AGI has been subject to so much hype and speculation it has become something of a Rorschach test. Mitchell points out that the debate will only be settled through long term, scientific investigation. To that end here is a short, accessible and provocative overview of AGI. I compare definitions of intelligence, settling on intelligence in terms of adaptation and AGI as an artificial scientist. Taking my queue from Sutton's Bitter Lesson I describe two foundational tools used to build adaptive systems: search and approximation. I compare pros, cons, hybrids and architectures like o3, AlphaGo, AERA, NARS and Hyperon. I then discuss overall meta-approaches to making systems behave more intelligently. I divide them into scale-maxing, simp-maxing, w-maxing based on the Bitter Lesson, Ockham's and Bennett's Razors. These maximise resources, simplicity of form, and the weakness of constraints on functionality. I discuss examples including AIXI, the free energy principle and The Embiggening of language models. I conclude that though scale-maxed approximation dominates, AGI will be a fusion of tools and meta-approaches. The Embiggening was enabled by improvements in hardware. Now the bottlenecks are sample and energy efficiency.

We attempt to define what is necessary to construct an Artificial Scientist, explore and evaluate several approaches to artificial general intelligence (AGI) which may facilitate this, conclude that a unified or hybrid approach is necessary and explore two theories that satisfy this requirement to some degree.

How the Theory Explains Humor. Consider the following statement: Biological organisms are driven by the "Four Big F's": Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, Mating. Some subjective observers who read this for the first time think it is funny. As the eyes are sequentially scanning the text the brain receives a complex visual input stream. The latter is subjectively partially compressible as it relates to the observer's previous knowledge about letters and words.

Researchers say that they are on the verge of cracking the aging code. They also say that death caused by aging may become obsolete by 2033 if artificial intelligence gets involved. Scientists from the Maximum Life Foundation believe that the combination of two fields of science will cure aging. They also believe that this combination will keep us healthy and young. These fields are artificial intelligence and gene therapy. Researchers at Scicog Systems are creating an'Artificial Scientist'.