Why Won't Sundar Pichai Say AGI?

Kevin Roose says Sundar Pichai does not say AGI. Demis Hassabis does, and Sergey Brin does. Roose does not think the labs feel it equally. Anthropic is the most AGI-pilled, OpenAI is a close second, and Google has always struggled. Ilya Sutskever used to walk floor to floor at OpenAI telling people to feel the AGI.

Inside Google, researchers fought it out on internal message boards. One wrote a memo called Say AGI: if Google wants to win in AI, recruit top technical talent, and be careful about how it develops AI, it has to admit, by using the term, that the work is more than tools that make Gmail, Docs, and Google Photos better. It is building toward human-level general intelligence. Someone else immediately wrote a memo saying not to say AGI, and calling the term horrible and unscientific. They went back and forth. One faction still wants to talk about narrow tools. A growing faction says Google is building AGI, or had better say so, or top people will go to OpenAI or Anthropic.

At Google I/O in May, Hassabis ended the keynote by saying they were in the foothills of the singularity. Asked what that meant, Pichai said to take it up with Demis, then turned to new features in Google Assistant. Roose thinks that disconnect may explain a lot about Google right now.