This piece is part “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis,” in collaboration with Data & Society. Read more about the series here.
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 21, 2025: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (center), US President Donald Trump (left), Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison (first right), and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (second right) speak during a news conference announcing an investment in AI infrastructure. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
“AGI is coming very, very soon. And then after that, that’s not the goal. After that, artificial superintelligence. We’ll come to solve the issues that mankind would never ever have thought that we could solve. Well, this is the beginning of our golden age.”—Masayoshi Son, January 21, 2025, speaking at Donald Trump’s press conference announcing the Stargate initiative
Tech CEOs, futurists, and venture capitalists describe artificial general intelligence (AGI) as if it were an inevitable and ultimate goal for technology development. In reality, the term is a vague signifier for a technology that will somehow lead to endless abundance for humankind — and conveniently also a means to avoid accountability as tech moguls make off with billions in capital investment and, more alarmingly, public spending. AGI is a term that famously lacks a precise meaning, and certainly does not refer to any particular imminent technology. Definitions range broadly in ways that primarily suit the economic arrangements of the individuals and organizations ostensibly trying to create it, or the cultural mystique of a set of adherents to a set of fringe ideologies. OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” Mark Zuckerberg has said that he does not have a “one-sentence, pithy definition” of the concept. Embodying the mysticism around the term, Ilya Sustkever, the former Chief AI Scientist at OpenAI, would lead chants of “Feel the AGI!” around the office. In a leaked agreement, Microsoft and OpenAI crafted a much more well-defined metric: whether such a system could generate $100 billion in profit.
In all these cases, the term is meant to evoke something with awesome power, much like the term “AI” used to, before it became overexposed in marketing. The bid for awe in the use of “AGI” echoes the discourse from the field’s origins. In an influential 1956 report, computer scientist Marvin Minsky, considered to be one of the founders of the academic dis
