Once upon a time\u2014meaning, um, as recently as earlier this year\u2014Silicon Valley couldn\u2019t stop talking about AGI.<\/p>\n
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in January: \u201cWe are now confident we know how to build AGI.\u201d 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 \u201cAGI achieved internally.\u201d OpenAI was so AGI-entranced that its head of sales dubbed her team \u201cAGI Sherpas\u201d and its former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever led his fellow researchers in campfire chants of \u201cFeel the AGI!\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s partner and major financial backer Microsoft<\/a> put out a paper in 2024 claiming OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4 AI model exhibited \u201csparks of AGI.\u201d 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<\/a>, told reporters that the world was \u201con the cusp\u201d of AGI. Meta<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was committed to \u201cbuilding full general intelligence\u201d to power the next generation of its products and services. Dario Amodei, cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, while noting he disliked the term \u201cAGI,\u201d said \u201cpowerful AI\u201d could arrive by 2027 and usher in a new age of health and abundance\u2014if it didn\u2019t wind up killing us all. Eric Schmidt, the former Google<\/a> CEO turned prominent tech investor, said in a talk in April that we would have AGI \u201cwithin three to five years.\u201d<\/p>\n Now the AGI fever is breaking\u2014in 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 \u201cnot a super-useful term.\u201d In the New York Times, Schmidt\u2014yes that same guy who was talking up AGI in April\u2014urged 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 \u201coverhyped.\u201d<\/p>\n AGI: Under-defined and overhyped<\/p>\n What happened? Well, first, a little background. Everyone agrees that AGI stands for \u201cartificial general intelligence.\u201d And that\u2019s pretty much the only thing everyone agrees upon. People define the term in subtly, but importantly, different ways. Among the first to use the term was physicist Mark Avrum Gubrud who in a 1997 research article wrote that \u201cby advanced artificial general intelligence, I mean AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed, that can acquire, manipulate, and reason with general knowledge, and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be needed.\u201d<\/p>\n The term was later picked up and popularized by AI researcher Shane Legg\u2014who would go on to cofound Google DeepMind with Hassabis\u2014and fellow computer scientists Ben Goertzel and Peter Voss in the early 2000s. They defined AGI, according to Voss, as an AI system that could learn to \u201creliably perform any cognitive task that a competent human can.\u201d That definition had some problems\u2014for instance, who decides who qualifies as a competent human? And, since then, other AI researchers have developed different definitions that see AGI as AI that is as capable as any human expert at all tasks, as opposed to merely a \u201ccompetent\u201d person. OpenAI was founded in late 2015 with the explicit mission of developing AGI \u201cfor the benefit of all,\u201d and it added its own twist to the AGI definition debate. The company\u2019s charter says AGI is an autonomous system that can \u201coutperform humans at most economically valuable work.\u201d<\/p>\n But whatever AGI is, the important thing these days, it seems, is not to talk about it. And the reason why has to do with growing concerns that progress in AI development may not be galloping ahead as fast as industry insiders touted just a few months ago\u2014and growing indications that all the AGI talk was stoking inflated expectations that the tech itself couldn\u2019t live up to. <\/p>\n Among the biggest factors in AGI\u2019s sudden fall from grace, seems to have been the rollout of OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5 model in early August. Just over two years after Microsoft\u2019s claim that GPT-4 showed \u201csparks\u201d of AGI, the new model landed with a thud: incremental improvements wrapped in a routing architecture, not the breakthrough many expected.\u00a0Goertzel, who helped coin the term AGI, reminded the public that while GPT-5 is impressive, it remains nowhere near true AGI\u2014lacking real understanding, continuous learning, or grounded experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n Altman\u2019s retreat from AGI language is especially striking given his prior position. OpenAI was built on AGI hype: AGI is in the company\u2019s founding mission, it helped raise billions in capital, and it underpins the partnership with Microsoft. A clause in their agreement even states that if OpenAI\u2019s nonprofit board declares it has achieved AGI, Microsoft\u2019s access to future technology would be restricted. Microsoft\u2014after investing more than $13 billion\u2014is reportedly pushing to remove that clause, and has even considered walking away from the deal. Wired also reported on an internal OpenAI debate over whether publishing a paper on measuring AI progress could complicate the company\u2019s ability to declare it had achieved AGI.\u00a0<\/p>\n A \u2018very healthy\u2019 vibe shift<\/p>\n But whether observers think the vibe shift is a marketing move or a market response, many, particularly on the corporate side, say it is a good thing. Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, called the move \u201cvery healthy,\u201d noting that markets reward execution, not vague \u201csomeday superintelligence\u201d narratives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Others stress that the real shift is away from a monolithic AGI fantasy, toward domain-specific \u201csuperintelligences.\u201d Daniel Saks, CEO of agentic AI company Landbase, argued that \u201cthe hype cycle around AGI has always rested on the idea of a single, centralized AI that becomes all-knowing,\u201d but said that is not what he sees happening. \u201cThe future lies in decentralized, domain-specific models that achieve superhuman performance in particular fields,\u201d he told Fortune.<\/p>\n Christopher Symons, chief AI scientist at digital health platform Lirio, said that the term AGI was never useful: Those promoting AGI, he explained, \u201cdraw resources away from more concrete applications where AI advancements can most immediately benefit society.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, the retreat from AGI rhetoric doesn\u2019t mean the mission\u2014or the phrase\u2014has vanished. Anthropic and DeepMind executives continue to call themselves \u201cAGI-pilled,\u201d which is a bit of insider slang. Even that phrase is disputed, though; for some it refers to the belief that AGI is imminent, while others say it\u2019s simply the belief that AI models will continue to improve. But there is no doubt that there is more hedging and downplaying than doubling down.<\/p>\n Some still call out urgent risks<\/p>\n And for some, that hedging is exactly what makes the risks more urgent. Former OpenAI researcher Steven Adler told Fortune: \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t lose sight that some AI companies are explicitly aiming to build systems smarter than any human. AI isn\u2019t there yet, but whatever you call this, it\u2019s dangerous and demands real seriousness.\u201d<\/p>\n Others accuse AI leaders of changing their tune on AGI to muddy the waters in a bid to avoid regulation. Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute, says Altman calling AGI \u201cnot a useful term\u201d isn\u2019t scientific humility, but a way for the company to steer clear of regulation while continuing to build toward more and more powerful models.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s smarter for them to just talk about AGI in private with their investors,\u201d he told Fortune, adding that \u201cit\u2019s like a cocaine salesman saying that it\u2019s unclear whether cocaine is really a drug,\u201d because it\u2019s just so complex and difficult to decipher.\u00a0<\/p>\n Call it AGI or call it something else\u2014the hype may fade and the vibe may shift, but with so much on the line, from money and jobs to security and safety, the real questions about where this race leads are only just beginning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once upon a time\u2014meaning, um, as recently as earlier this year\u2014Silicon Valley couldn\u2019t stop talking about AGI. 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