In this photo illustration, the logo of 'OpenAI' is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a ... [+]
The branding of “artificial intelligence” or AI has been the most successful marketing campaign in history. But when everybody is doing “AI,” tech leaders must come up with a new brand, both more exciting and ominous, to stay above the din. Declaring that “Artificial General Intelligence” or AGI is just around the corner and that their company is at the forefront of the race to get there, attracts scarce AI talent and the attention of investors, policy makers and world leaders.
Following its warning to prosecute businesses involved in “AI washing”—making unfounded AI claims to the public—the SEC has fined two investment advisers for allegedly making false statements about their use of AI. Being a regulatory agency, the SEC is by definition behind the times. In 2024, AI is everywhere, a prominent part of earnings calls by all types of businesses, regardless of what they actually mean by “AI.” In this over-hyped environment, tech leaders must accelerate and upgrade their marketing efforts, from AI to AGI. At this point, the SEC should actually investigate “AGI washing,” the making of false statements about the existence today or in the very near future of artificial human-level intelligence or even “superintelligence.”
The people making these false statements use different definitions of AGI, when they bother at all to offer a definition, and it is typically a not-easy-to-calibrate definition. For example,
· Nvidia’s Jensen Huang: A piece of software or a computer that can complete tests which reflect basic intelligence that's fairly competitive to that of a normal human, arriving within the next five years.
· OpenAI: Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at the most economically valuable work, arriving this decade; or AI systems that are generally smarter than humans, and per Altman in January 2024, arriving in the “reasonably close-ish future.”
· Elon Musk in his legal brief against OpenAI: A machine having intelligence for a wide variety of tasks like a human, already here in the form of GPT-4, an “AGI algorithm” which is “better at reasonings than average human beings.”
Why all the obsessive talk about poorly-defined AGI? Why all the promises of its imminent arrival?
A major driver of “AGI washing” is the fierce competition for scarce AI talent. How do you attract people that can command up to a million dollars in compensation? You can count on Mark Zuckerberg to be straightforward about it: “We need to build for general intelligence… I think that’s important to convey because a lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems.”
Venture capital firms want to invest in the more ambitious solutions which promise greater returns. If you have millions of dollars itching to enter the startup economy, and you suffer from profound existential FoMO or fear of missing out, why not throw it at what OpenAI promises will change “the limits of possibility” and possibly, the limits of your personal bank account? For those, like Zuckerberg, who don’t need VCs anymore, AGI talk helps assure stock market investors that they are also not missing out on the next big thing.
Last but not least reason to promote AGI is attention. Not the algorithmic attention of “Attention is All You Need,” the seminal paper that launched the generative AI race, but the attention that people like Musk and Altman and even lesser luminaries or would-be celebrities, need. The negative aspect of the AGI brand, the dire predictions about the destruction of humanity, ensure the elevated status of our new masters of the universe, the ones with the secret key to the power that could elevate or debase humanity.
The AGI titillation explains why someone like Altman who was limited in the exercise of his charisma to Silicon Valley before the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT, could spend so much time over the next year charming political leaders all around the world.
But why are Altman and all other promoters of AGI so interested in spreading fake news about the imminent destruction of humanity, you may ask, aren’t they asking for government regulation? Yes, they do. Tech leaders know well that government regulation favors the incumbents and would surely deter and slowdown emerging competition, including from those insisting on open-sourcing their AI models (such as Facebook).
There are, of course, many promoters of AGI who are not actually developing any AGI or even AI. For them, the reward is also getting attention, in the form of a grant or an interview or a speaking engagement or any other benefit of being at the center of attention, even for just 15 minutes or, in our times, just 15 seconds.
AGI is a figment of human imagination, a delusion, a hallucination, supported by the modern religion of “we are as gods,” and the modern adherence to materialism. If the brain is a computer, and humans have created computers, surely it is just a matter of time before we endow a machine with our cognitive powers or even super-powers. AGI has been “just around the corner” since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1955 and before that as “thinking machines,” a perennial popular delusion.
The term “AGI” is relatively recent, coined in 2007. Next in my AGI Washing Series, I will offer a short history of the subject.
