CEOs have spent the past year downplaying the importance of \u201cAGI\u201d as a milestone. Dario Amodei, CEO of Amazon-backed Anthropic, has said<\/a> publicly<\/a> that he \u201cdislike[s] the term AGI\u201d and that he\u2019s \u201calways thought of it as a marketing term.\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in August<\/a> that it\u2019s \u201cnot a super useful term.\u201d Jeff Dean, Google\u2019s chief scientist and Gemini lead, has said<\/a> he \u201ctend[s] to steer away from AGI conversations.\u201d Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said<\/a> we\u2019re getting \u201ca little bit ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype,\u201d and that at the end of the day, \u201cself-claiming some AGI milestone\u201d is \u201cjust nonsensical benchmark hacking.\u201d He also said<\/a> on a recent earnings call that he doesn\u2019t believe that \u201cAGI as defined, at least by us in our contract, is ever going to be achieved anytime soon.\u201d<\/p>\n In its place, they\u2019re pushing a cornucopia of competing terminology. Meta has \u201cpersonal superintelligence,\u201d Microsoft has \u201chumanist superintelligence,\u201d Amazon has \u201cuseful general intelligence,\u201d and Anthropic has \u201cpowerful AI.\u201d It\u2019s a sharp about-face for all of these companies, which previously bought into the AGI benchmark \u2014 and the fear of missing out that came from not chasing it \u2014 in recent years.<\/p>\n Part of the problem with \u201cAGI\u201d is that the more advanced AI gets, the more poorly defined the term seems \u2014 since the concept of AI that\u2019s \u201cequal to human intelligence\u201d looks different to virtually everyone. \u201cLots of people have very different definitions of it, and the difficulty of the problem varies by factors of a trillion,\u201d Dean said.<\/p>\n Yet some companies have billions of dollars riding on this nebulous phrase, a problem that\u2019s clearest in the strange, ever-changing relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI.<\/p>\n In 2019, OpenAI and Microsoft famously signed a contract with an \u201cAGI clause.\u201d It gave Microsoft the right to use OpenAI\u2019s tech until the latter achieved AGI. But the contract apparently didn\u2019t fully define what that meant. When the deal was renewed in October<\/a>, things got even more complicated. The terms shifted<\/a> to say that \u201conce AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel\u201d \u2014 meaning that now, it won\u2019t just be OpenAI\u2019s call to define what AGI means, it\u2019ll be a group of industry experts \u2014 and Microsoft won\u2019t lose all its rights to the tech once that happens, either. The simplest way to put this whole ordeal off? Just don\u2019t say AGI.<\/p>\n Another problem is that AGI has developed some baggage. Tech companies have spent years detailing their own fears about how the technology could<\/a> destroy<\/a> everything<\/a>. Books have been written (think: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies). Hunger strikes<\/a> have made headlines. For a while, it was still good publicity \u2014 saying your tech is so powerful that you\u2019re worried about its influence on the Earth seems to draw big investor dollars. But the public, unsurprisingly, soured on that idea<\/a>. So, with the complicated definitions, contract drama, and public fear around superpowerful AI, it\u2019s a lot easier to market less-loaded terminology. That\u2019s why every tech company seems to be making some new brand of \u201cintelligence\u201d its own.<\/p>\n One popular general-purpose replacement for AGI is \u201cartificial superintelligence,\u201d or ASI. ASI is AI that surpasses human intelligence in virtually every area \u2014 compared to AGI, which is now generally defined as AI that\u2019s equal to human intelligence. But for some in the tech industry, even the idea of \u201csuperintelligence\u201d has become amorphous and conflated with AGI. The multiple theoretical milestones don\u2019t even have clearly distinguished timelines. Amodei says<\/a> he expects \u201cpowerful AI\u201d to come \u201cas early as 2026.\u201d Altman says<\/a> he expects AGI to be developed in the \u201creasonably close-ish future.\u201d<\/p>\n So companies have developed their own variants. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January<\/a> that the company needed \u201cto build for [artificial] general intelligence,\u201d but by July, he had pivoted<\/a> to \u201cpersonal superintelligence\u201d in a manifesto. It was a power-to-the-people spin on AGI that \u201chelps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.\u201d Zuckerberg used the manifesto to combat public fears of AI taking jobs and throw shade at Meta\u2019s competitors, calling the company\u2019s vision \u201cdistinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.\u201d<\/p>\n Microsoft, however, has also rebranded its venture as chasing \u201cHumanist Superintelligence (HSI),\u201d which is essentially Zuckerberg\u2019s manifesto in a different font. The company is defining HSI<\/a> as \u201cincredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for, in service of, people and humanity more generally\u201d and are \u201cproblem-oriented\u201d instead of being \u201can unbounded and unlimited entity with high degrees of autonomy.\u201d The rebrand came complete with a new website<\/a>, topped with the term \u201cApproachable Intelligence,\u201d backed with a sepia-style background and a soft color palette, and awash with paintings and photos of nature.<\/p>\n Image: Microsoft AI<\/p>\n For Amazon\u2019s part, it has rebranded<\/a> its<\/a> AGI efforts as chasing \u201cuseful general intelligence,\u201d or \u201cAI that makes us smarter and gives us more agency.\u201d Late last year, the company hired the founders of Adept, an agentic AI startup, and licensed its technology, in efforts to compete against others in the AGI race. Like the other companies\u2019 branding efforts, though, Amazon is positioning<\/a> its UGI efforts as useful, easily defined, and decidedly not all-powerful or scary: just \u201cenabling practical AI that can actually do things for us and make our customers more productive, empowered, and fulfilled.\u201d<\/p>\n With \u201cpowerful AI,\u201d Anthropic has no interest in seeming down-to-earth. Amodei dubs it a \u201c\u2018country of geniuses in a datacenter\u2019\u201d that is \u201csmarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields \u2014 biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc.\u201d Powerful AI, he said, would be able to write compelling novels, prove unsolved theorems in mathematics, and write complex code. It would not just answer questions but complete complex, multistep tasks over hours, days, or weeks, similar to AI CEOs\u2019 vision of a successful AI agent<\/a>, and \u201cabsorb information and generate actions at roughly 10x\u2013100x human speed.\u201d<\/p>\n AGI and ASI were already a lot to reckon with. Now we\u2019ve got PSI, HSI, UGI, and PI, too. 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