Silicon Valley experienced intense proclamations that artificial general intelligence (AGI) was imminent, with executives and researchers making concrete timelines and claims of internal achievement. OpenAI's CEO asserted confidence in knowing how to build AGI and conveyed predictions of achievement in 2025, alongside internal tweets claiming AGI was achieved. Microsoft published a paper claiming GPT-4 exhibited "sparks of AGI." High-profile figures including Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei, and Eric Schmidt offered near-term AGI timelines and visions. The mood then shifted toward pragmatism, with calls to avoid fixating on superhuman AI and to prioritize useful, safer AI development.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI." 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 "AGI achieved internally." OpenAI was so AGI-entranced that its head of sales dubbed her team "AGI sherpas" and its former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever led the fellow researchers in campfire chants of "Feel the AGI!"
OpenAI's partner and major financial backer Microsoft put out a paper in 2024 claiming OpenAI's GPT-4 AI model exhibited "sparks of AGI." 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 co-founder of Googe DeepMind, told reporters that the world was "on the cusp" of AGI.
Now the AGI fever is breaking-in what amounts to a wholesale vibe shift towards pragmatism as opposed to chasing utopian visions. For example, at a CNBC appearance this summer, Altman called AGI "not a super-useful term." In the New York Times, Schmidt-yes that same guy who was talking up AGI in April-urged Silicon Valley to stop fixating on superhuman AI, warning that the obsession distracts from building useful technology.
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