AI companies are sick of their favorite buzzword.

The cringe comes for us all, and for all our hot new turns of phrase. “Rizz” lost its luster when grandparents started asking about its meaning. Teachers who dressed up as “6-7” on Halloween drove a nail into the coffin of Gen Alpha’s rallying cry. And tech CEOs who once trumpeted the quest for “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, are jumping ship for any other term they can find.

Until recently, AGI was the ultimate goal of the AI industry. The vaguely defined term was reportedly coined in 1997 by Mark Gubrud, a researcher who defined it as “AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed.” The term still typically denotes AI that’s equal to or surpasses human intelligence. But now, several of the biggest companies are going for a rebrand — creating their own phrases or acronyms that (spoiler alert) still mean, essentially, the same thing.

CEOs have spent the past year downplaying the importance of “AGI” as a milestone. Dario Amodei, CEO of Amazon-backed Anthropic, has said publicly that he “dislike[s] the term AGI” and that he’s “always thought of it as a marketing term.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in August that it’s “not a super useful term.” Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and Gemini lead, has said he “tend[s] to steer away from AGI conversations.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said we’re getting “a little bit ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype,” and that at the end of the day, “self-claiming some AGI milestone” is “just nonsensical benchmark hacking.” He also said on a recent earnings call that he doesn’t believe that “AGI as defined, at least by us in our contract, is ever going to be achieved anytime soon.”

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