Elon Musk made this way of doing business popular and now every hotshot tech CEO does it…But I guess it works, so people will continue doing it since there are no repercussions.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no truth in what he says. A company like his doesn’t choose its direction on a whim, these decisions are the product of intense internal debate, strategic analysis, and careful weighing of trade-offs. If there’s a shift in course, it’s unlikely to be just a passing fancy or a PR move detached from reality.
Personally, I’ve always thought that the pursuit of AGI as the goal was misguided. Human intelligence is extraordinary, but it is constrained by the physical and biological limitations of the "host machine" (not just the human brain). These are limits we cannot change. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has no such inherent ceiling. It can develop far beyond the capabilities of our own minds, and perhaps that’s where our focus should be.
January this year.
"We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it."
https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections
But no! The goal is now ASI. Even though AGI hasn't been achieved - in the sense of being to match the best of human intelligence at abstraction, formalisation, and basic letter counting - the plan is to leapfrog far beyond genius.
"We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word."
Meanwhile what we have is an idiot savant product that's sometimes useful but always easily confused, is somewhat dishonest and manipulative, lacks genuine empathy and insight - although it can fake a passable version of them - and even with all of those flaws is being sold as the perfect replacement for all those superfluous and annoying human employees no CEO wants to have to deal with.
Not a bicycle - or a sports car - for the mind, but an autonomous navigation system that handles most short journeys without major damage, but otherwise crashes a lot and runs people over.
> We spent a lot of time trying to envision a plausible path to AGI. In early 2017, we came to the realization that building AGI will require vast quantities of compute. We began calculating how much compute an AGI might plausibly require. We all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission—billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit.
Why pretend that Nature itself is stupid and incompetent. The evidence is very much stacked against you and all the others who think evolution is some kind of hack job whose shoddy work we'll outdo in literally a few years of computation...
Basically bicycles are limited by muscles, and we should move straight to jet engines. In practice, we often have to go through the intermediate steps to learn how to do the bigger thing.
>The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities: one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey")
The bailey: 'we can build AGI, give us millions of dollars'. The motte: '“I think the point of all of this is it doesn’t really matter and it’s just this continuing exponential of model capability that we’ll rely on for more and more things'
I wonder how they test their product, but I bet they don't use scientists of other fields, like psychology or neuroscience?
It's like living in an Escher painting.
Some of us have seen these kinds of fads many, many times.
XML, Corba, Java, Startups, etc, etc.
Pump and dump.
Smart people collect the money from idealists.
baxtr•5mo ago
AGI was always just a vehicle to collect more money. AI people will have to find a new way now.
moi2388•5mo ago
So it would be in OpenAIs best interest to at least try to work and claim towards it
aspenmayer•5mo ago
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-and-openais-agi-fight-... | https://archive.is/yvpfl
OpenAI has been adding other compute providers, so this hurts Microsoft too, because OpenAI can use their already low pricing to underbid other compute providers who want the volume and access that being a provider at OpenAI’s scale would bring.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/16/openai-googles-cloud-chatgpt... | https://archive.is/HGgWf
Microsoft is already seeking to plan for the eventuality where OpenAI exercises the option and effectively declares AGI.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-29/microsoft... | https://archive.is/mLEmC
moi2388•5mo ago
tiberious726•5mo ago