Once upon a time—meaning, um, as recently as earlier this year—Silicon Valley couldn’t stop talking about AGI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in January: “We are now confident we know how to build AGI.” This is after he told a Y Combinator vodcast in late 2024 that AGI might be achieved in 2025 and tweeted in 2024 that OpenAI had “AGI achieved internally.” OpenAI was so AGI-entranced that its head of sales dubbed her team “AGI Sherpas” and its former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever led his fellow researchers in campfire chants of “Feel the AGI!”
OpenAI’s partner and major financial backer Microsoft put out a paper in 2024 claiming OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model exhibited “sparks of AGI.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk founded xAI in March 2023 with a mission to build AGI, a development he said might occur as soon as 2025 or 2026. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel-laureate cofounder of Google DeepMind, told reporters that the world was “on the cusp” of AGI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was committed to “building full general intelligence” to power the next generation of its products and services. Dario Amodei, cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, while noting he disliked the term “AGI,” said “powerful AI” could arrive by 2027 and usher in a new age of health and abundance—if it didn’t wind up killing us all. Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO turned prominent tech investor, said in a talk in April that we would have AGI “within three to five years.”
Now the AGI fever is breaking—in what amounts to a wholesale vibe shift toward pragmatism as opposed to chasing utopian visions. For example, at a CNBC appearance this summer, Altman called AGI “not a super-useful term.” In the New York Times, Schmidt—yes that same guy who was talking up AGI in April—urged Silicon Valley to stop fixating on superhuman AI, warning that the obsession distracts from building useful technology. Both AI pioneer Andrew Ng and U.S. AI czar David Sacks called AGI “overhyped.”
