David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, is throwing cold water on the AGI hype train.
AI companies are racing to achieve AGI, or artificial general intelligence, commonly considered a form of AI that can reach human levels of reasoning. The continued advancement of AI has led some to believe that the technology will lead to a large-scale wipeout of jobs or even worse outcomes, like human extinction.
Sacks, a tech investor who has supported major companies such as Airbnb, Facebook, and Uber, wrote in an X post on Saturday that AI hasn’t progressed as quickly as many have predicted — specifically, the idea that AI will “self-improve” and rapidly achieve “godlike superintelligence” has been blown out of proportion.
“None of this is to gainsay the progress. We are seeing strong improvement in quality, usability, and price/performance across the top model companies. This is the stuff of great engineering and should be celebrated,” Sacks wrote in his post. “It’s just not the stuff of apocalyptic pronouncements. Oppenheimer has left the building.”
One of the doomsday scenarios Sacks rejected in his post is the fear that AI will lead to massive job losses.
The investor said that’s yet to pan out since AI relies on a lot of human input for prompts and for verification.
“This means that apocalyptic predictions of job loss are as overhyped as AGI itself,” he said. “Instead, the truism that ‘you’re not going to lose your job to AI but to someone who uses AI better than you’ is holding up well.”
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Sacks isn’t the only AGI naysayer.
Google Brain’s cofounder Andrew Ng said at a June Y Combinator talk that “AGI has been overhyped” and that “there’ll be a lot of things that humans can do that AI cannot.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Lex Fridman podcast that he likes to use the term AJI, or “artificial jagged intelligence,” to describe the current phase of AI — one that is remarkably intelligent but can still make basic mistakes.
Sacks did not respond to a request for comment.
