What AGI hype means for Washington
Politico January 8, 2025
With help from Derek Robertson
OpenAI’s Sam Altman kicked off 2025 with a daring declaration: The company now knows how to build artificial general intelligence, and is ready to turn its attention to the glorious future of superintelligence.
That would be at once thrilling and scary. Artificial general intelligence — an AI that can outperform humans across the board, adapting to new challenges as the human brain does — is a massively hyped, long-sought milestone for the technology. Critics worry it could lead to mass job displacement, social disruption and possibly disastrous existential consequences. Believers see AGI as inevitable, and welcome its potential to create economic abundance and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
And as a business proposition, it’s...