Brett Hall hit the nail on the head in a recent commentary on Jensen Huang’s latest proclamation that we’ve reached AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): It’s all just marketing talk.
Here’s a snippet from Brett’s video, with minor voice-to-text edits, and emphasis mine:
Jensen Huang once again has announced we’ve got AGI—again. Who am I to gainsay him, though? He’s the CEO of NVIDIA, the most valuable company on the planet, almost single-handedly driving the progress in the hardware on which these models are running. He himself is worth over 200 billion US dollars. He’s an electrical engineer. He’s a very smart guy.
Sam Altman, also a smart guy, in a January 2025 blog said, “we are now confident we know how to build AGI, as we have traditionally understood it.” And in July 2026, he said, “we are now like in the singularity.”
Elon Musk has made similar remarks about that as well. Altman’s also said AGI “kind of went whooshing by and that the term is not that useful because the bar keeps moving.”
What bar?
Apparently, we’ve met the bar, we’ve exceeded the bar. And yet, isn’t the bar supposed to be the thing that tells us whether or not we’ve got AGI?
Who’s setting this bar?
It wasn’t any of us who were speaking from the philosophical side of things. The philosophically minded people on this have not set bars in the way the tech people do.
The tech people have, want, desire, think it’s possible to have quantifiable metrics when it comes to this. Why?
Well, all these announcements essentially amount to marketing. It’s like Altman saying from time to time as he does that his model can solve all of physics or is soon about to solve all of physics. Or when Musk says Grok is smarter than any PhD and he’s got an IQ of 300 or something.
Huang and others are speaking to their shareholders.
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But if you’re interested in reality without the hype, the actual philosophy and science of this, then you have to go beyond these benchmarks.
The benchmarks and tests exist to be passed so that CEOs and others have something to report. Progress. They have a quantifiable metric of progress. […] But as for saying it’s a metric for or a benchmark for AGI, that’s another thing.
It’s all to the good to be able to talk about how much progress we’re having and how fast it’s going on. That gives us a little bit of an indication about how far we’ve come in terms of technology and wealth creation and all the great advantages that are coming to us as the users. But when it comes to the philosophy, never mind the financials of these big tech companies, benchmarks cannot matter a jot.
The term AGI as used by tech CEOs has not only become detached from the original definition, it’s become effectively meaningless. It no longer represents a mind with the same general — universal — explanatory ability as ours but instantiated on silicon instead of grey matter. The AGI tech CEOs tout means a machine capable of doing remarkably many different things remarkably well, according to whichever definition of many, well, and remarkably serves their purpose. It’s hot air. It’s something they say to signal: we’re doing great.
It’s not surprising when CEOs go around hyping up their products, especially in today’s media environment. Companies need marketing to attract new customers and, crucially, new investors. As users who benefit from LLMs and AI agents, we should appreciate the contribution of the investors who financed LLM and AI agent development as much as the researchers and engineers who built them.
So why take to the keyboard and rant about it? Isn’t this just CEOs being CEOs?
The thing is, there’s a difference between Apple-style, self-aggrandizing PR releases and the incessant misdirection and bullshitting we see from AI companies, boosted by a media industry interested only in sensationalist headlines. It’s one thing to introduce the latest incremental improvement as our best iPhone ever with great fanfare. It’s another to claim your product can solve all of physics! That’s intellectually dishonest. We should have no patience for that.
The hype, and its companion, constant fearmongering, might taint the idea of AGI at large in the same way that environmentalists tainted nuclear energy. We’re already seeing politicians jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon.
But AI research and development is useful. And AGI research even more so, not because we necessarily need more intelligence (although we do), but because to build AGI we first need to understand GI: general intelligence. That is, ourselves.