{"id":104645,"date":"2025-08-29T04:25:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T04:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/104645\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T04:25:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T04:25:08","slug":"marc-benioff-cant-get-enough-of-the-ai-hype-unless-you-say-agi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/104645\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Benioff Can’t Get Enough of the AI Hype\u2014Unless You Say ‘AGI’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Benioff, a guy who has poured money into artificial intelligence investments and claims that AI tools are doing half of the work at Salesforce<\/a>, isn\u2019t so sure about all the hype around this whole sector all of a sudden. During an appearance on the \u201c20VC\u201d podcast, as spotted by Business Insider, Benioff poured water on the concept of \u201cartificial general intelligence,\u201d calling the obsession around the industry\u2019s white whale \u201chypnosis.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the conversation, podcast host Harry Stebbings\u2014himself a venture capitalist who has lots of money<\/a> tied up in the success of AI\u2014pointed to a recent interview The Verge<\/a> conducted with Amazon AGI Labs chief David Luan, in which Luan said there are fewer than 1,000 people in the world who would be \u201cextremely valuable contributors\u201d to building cutting edge AI systems. Benioff scoffed, not just at Luan\u2019s statement but his very title. \u201cAGI head, that sounds like an oxymoron,\u201d the Salesforce CEO said.<\/p>\n

Benioff explained that he\u2019s skeptical of the very idea of artificial general intelligence, the theory that AI could one day develop human-like cognitive processing skills for reasoning and learning, rather than just spitting back outputs based on training data. \u201cYou\u2019re talking to somebody who is extremely suspect if anybody uses those initials, \u2018AGI,’\u201d Benioff said. \u201cI think that we have all been sold a lot of hypnosis around what\u2019s about to happen with AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t rule out the possibility of eventually achieving AGI, but stated, \u201cI just realize that isn\u2019t the state of technology today,\u201d and noted that no AI that people have interacted with comes close to that theoretical bar. \u201cIt\u2019s not a person, and it\u2019s not intelligent, and it\u2019s not conscious,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Benioff is right to sour on the idea of AGI, a concept that has only been muddied by the ongoing insistence by AI firms that it\u2019s right around the corner. Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, recently conceded<\/a> that his company\u2019s latest model, GPT-5, is not AGI because it doesn\u2019t \u201ccontinuously learn.\u201d Altman called the model \u201cgenerally intelligent\u201d but not AGI. Of course, the only official definition that OpenAI has for AGI isn\u2019t a technical one but a monetary one. Microsoft and OpenAI agreed to define AGI<\/a> as a system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.<\/p>\n

Of course, Benioff isn\u2019t above AI hype, either. In addition to claiming that one of his companies has farmed out half of all work to AI, he also used the pages of Time Magazine<\/a>\u2014a publication he owns\u2014to claim AI would result in \u201ca revolution that will fundamentally redefine how humans work, live, and connect with one another.\u201d Now, you won\u2019t believe this, but Salesforce happens to sell AI agents<\/a>. So Benioff certainly still believes in the AI hype for his own company\u2019s products. It\u2019s just everyone else who is overpromising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marc Benioff, a guy who has poured money into artificial intelligence investments and claims that AI tools are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[25272,62,30668,2139,276,277,49,48,4120,28254,61],"class_list":["post-104645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agi","tag-ai","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-artificial-intellience","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-emerging-technologies","tag-marc-benioff","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}