Once upon a time—meaning, um, as recently as earlier this year—Silicon Valley couldn’t stop talking about AGI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in January “we are now confident we know how to build AGI.” This is after he told a Y Combinator vodcast in late 2024 that AGI might be achieved in 2025 and tweeted in 2024 that OpenAI had “AGI achieved internally.” OpenAI was so AGI-entranced that its head of sales dubbed her team “AGI sherpas” and its former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever led the fellow researchers in campfire chants of “Feel the AGI!”

OpenAI’s partner and major financial backer Microsoft put out a paper in 2024 claiming OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model exhibited “sparks of AGI.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk founded xAI in March 2023 with a mission to build AGI, a development he said might occur a

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