Happy 2026! Will this be the year we finally achieve AGI? I’d like to propose a new version of the Turing Test, which I’ll call the Turing-AGI Test, to see if we’ve achieved this. I’ll explain in a moment why having a new test is important.
The public thinks achieving AGI means computers will be as intelligent as people and be able to do most or all knowledge work. I’d like to propose a new test. The test subject — either a computer or a skilled professional human — is given access to a computer that has internet access and software such as a web browser and Zoom. The judge will design a multi-day experience for the test subject, mediated through the computer, to carry out work tasks. For example, an experience might consist of a period of training (say, as a call center operator), followed by being asked to carry out the task (taking calls), with ongoing feedback. This mirrors what a remote worker with a fully working computer (but no webcam) might be expected to do.
A computer passes the Turing-AGI Test if it can carry out the work task as well as a skilled human.
Most members of the public likely believe a real AGI system will pass this test. Surely, if computers are as intelligent as humans, they should be able to perform work tasks as well as a human one might hire. Thus, the Turing-AGI Test aligns with the popular notion of what AGI means.
Here’s why we need a new test: “AGI” has turned into a term of hype rather than a term with a precise meaning. A reasonable definition of AGI is AI that can do any intellectual task that a human can. When businesses hype up that they might achieve AGI within a few quarters, they usually try to justify these statements by setting a much lower bar. This mismatch in definitions is harmful because it makes people think AI is becoming more powerful than it actually is. I’m seeing this mislead everyone from high-school students (who avoid certain fields of study because they think it’s pointless with AGI’s imminent arrival) to CEOs (who are deciding what projects to invest in, sometimes assuming AI will be more capable in 1-2 years than any likely reality).
The original Turing Test, which required a computer to fool a human judge, via text chat, into being unable to distinguish it from a human, has been insufficient to indicate human-level intelligence. The Loebner Prize competition actually ran the Turing Test and found that being able to simulate human typing errors — perhaps even more than actually demonstrating intelligence — was needed to fool judges. A main goal of AI development today is to build systems that can do economically useful work, not fool judges. Thus a modified test that measures ability to do work would be more useful than a test that measures the ability to fool humans.
For almost all AI benchmarks today (such as GPQA, AIME, SWE-bench, etc.), a test set is determined in advance. This means AI teams end up at least indirectly tuning their models to the published test sets. Further, any fixed test set measures only one narrow sliver of intelligence. In contrast, in the Turing Test, judges are free to ask any question to probe the model as they please. This lets a judge test how “general” the knowledge of the computer or human really is. Similarly, in the Turing-AGI Test, the judge can design any experience — which is not revealed in advance to the AI (or human subject) being tested. This is a better way to measure generality of AI than a predetermined test set.
AI is on an amazing trajectory of progress. In previous decades, overhyped expectations led to AI winters, when disappointment about AI capabilities caused reductions in interest and funding, which picked up again when the field made more progress. One of the few things that could get in the way of AI’s tremendous momentum is unrealistic hype that creates an investment bubble, risking disappointment and a collapse of interest. To avoid this, we need to recalibrate society’s expectations on AI. A test will help.
If we run a Turing-AGI Test competition and every AI system falls short, that will be a good thing! By defusing hype around AGI and reducing the chance of a bubble, we will create a more reliable path to continued investment in AI. This will let us keep on driving forward real technological progress and building valuable applications — even ones that fall well short of AGI. And if this test sets a clear target that teams can aim toward to claim the mantle of achieving AGI, that would be wonderful, too. And we can be confident that if a company passes this test, they will have created more than just a marketing release — it will be something incredibly valuable.
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Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.
On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.
But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!
As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.
Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.
Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.
Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!
The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)
Part 2: neutral atoms and qday
The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.
Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.
Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.
My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".
Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.
So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.
Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.
Part 3: post-quantum cryptography
There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.
These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.
The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.
Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.
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