Jensen Huang says Nvidia achieved AGI, again — not that

What happened

On Nvidia’s earnings call Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang casually announced the company had “achieved AGI,” one of the tech industry’s ultimate goals some of its biggest players have spent years chasing. ” He’s right. For the supposed finish line of the AI race, there is no consensus on what artificial general intelligence means, let alone how we’ll know when we’ve actually got there, which makes achieving it equally arbitrary.

” What really matters, Huang said, is that AI is “doing productive and useful work” and “generating profitable tokens,” with more compute producing more tokens — and, inevitably, more profit. “This is the exact phase where we’re at. ” This isn’t the first time Huang has said we’ve reached AGI. ” Huang didn’t say exactly what he meant by AGI.

Fridman proposed his own oddly specific definition: an AI system that’s able to “essentially do your job,” as in start, grow, and run a successful tech company worth more than $1 billion.

” Over the years, other tech leaders have capitalized on the term’s fuzziness and produced a veritable grab bag of definitions and benchmarks, all orbiting the same nebulous concept: AI capable of matching or surpassing human intelligence across a broad range of domains, despite the fact that “intelligence” also doesn’t have a universally agreed-upon definition.

The definition of AGI according to OpenAI – a company founded with the explicit goal of building it – leaves a lot of room for interpretation. ” Complicating matters is OpenAI’s different, financially-driven definition of AGI it worked out with Microsoft — reportedly systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.

In a recent Time story, chief research officer Mark Chen estimated OpenAI is “80% of the way” to AGI, while Altman said that by the end of the year the company would have something he would call AGI. The fact that both AGI and its threshold remain undefined is no secret: tech leaders say so themselves, even as they make predictions predicated on it.

Why it matters

” Others have similarly reached for their own terms to describe broadly similar ideas. In theory, there are supposed to be distinctions between them, but in practice they all bleed together. ” And OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly led employees in chants of “feel the AGI,” now runs a company called Safe Superintelligence. New terminology hasn’t made the meaning more tangible.

What to watch

So long as AGI remains poorly defined and carelessly used, the whole thing is senseless. Well, unless you want a handy tool for hyping up progress. So expect the industry — Huang included — to keep the AGI talk coming. Maybe an AGI will eventually show up and tell us what AGI actually means.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.