"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.""
AGI once served as the AI industry's stated ultimate goal. The term, reportedly coined in 1997 by Mark Gubrud as "AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed," typically denotes intelligence equal to or surpassing humans. Recently, major companies have created proprietary phrases and acronyms that essentially describe the same capabilities while publicly downplaying AGI as a milestone. Several prominent CEOs have criticized the usefulness of "AGI" and called it marketing or hype. The rebranding reflects a shift toward company-specific framing, distancing from the vague, loaded term while pursuing comparable technical ambitions.
Read at The Verge
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