Can we talk about how people keep calling every new AI model 'AGI'?

I was at a tech meetup in Portland last week and heard three different people call a new text-to-video tool 'a step toward AGI'. It hit me that this is happening everywhere now. Every time a company like OpenAI or Google drops a new model with a slightly bigger context window or better image generation, the hype machine slaps the 'AGI' label on it. It matters because it confuses what real, general intelligence would even look like and sets crazy public expectations. I know because I read the actual research papers, and they're usually just about scaling up data or improving one narrow task. The latest DeepMind paper I read, which was about game playing, got called 'proto-AGI' in a headline, but the paper itself never said that. It's like we've forgotten what the 'G' in AGI even stands for. Has anyone else noticed this specific word getting totally watered down?

2 comments

2 Comments

paul_thompson671d ago

Wait, a text-to-video tool is a step toward AGI now? That's wild. It's just making clips from words, not thinking. The word has lost all meaning if we call every single upgrade "proto-AGI." Feels like marketing took over and just ran with the scariest acronym they could find.

willow_ellis1d ago

Proto-AGI" is just the new "blockchain.