The AI Leaders Bringing The AGI Debate Down To Earth
TechCrunch, Wednesday, March 19th, 2025
During a recent dinner with business leaders in San Francisco, a comment I made cast a chill over the room. I hadn't asked my dining companions anything I considered to be extremely faux pas: simply whether they thought today's AI could someday achieve human-like intelligence (i.e. AGI) or beyond.
It's a more controversial topic than you might think.
In 2025, there's no shortage of tech CEOs offering the bull case for how large language models (LLMs), which power chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, could attain human-level or even super-human intelligence over the near term. These executives argue that highly capable AI will bring about widespread - and widely distributed - societal benefits.