The hot concept fueling the entire AI trade is the idea that eventually, somebody is going to achieve a somewhat nebulous state known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence. What precisely this means depends on a couple of things, but the most important one is, “How many billions of dollars did you convince this guy to give you and on what terms, precisely?”
It depends on who’s selling the idea and who’s buying it.
OpenAI’s charter defines it as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
Elon Musk says it’s AI that is “smarter than the smartest human.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks AGI is more like a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”
Evocative stuff.
But the main thing is that AGI — when a computer can complete most tasks a lot better than humans — is important because whoever gets that first (if ever!) is going to become unfathomably wealthy, as will all their investors, in the process of fundamentally reshaping the American economy with a piece of technology that can efficiently replace every knowledge worker in the country.
As a result, the definition of AGI depends on who’s selling the idea and who’s buying it.