At the same time we were sending out our newsletter last week, Elon Musk’s lawyers were sending a package of legal papers to the OpenAI offices in San Francisco. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI is no stranger to corporate drama, having been ousted from his role for a weekend back in 2023 (an internal investigation is set to report back on that episode in the coming days). At the time he attributed some of the chaos to the level of tension being experience by his team as they neared their ultimate goal of creating ‘AGI’. The term AGI (artificial general intelligence) is increasingly used not to describe a distant abstract concept, but to define a threshold that some feel is perhaps only months away, and would signal computers systems as capable as humans across most day-to-day economically valuable tasks.
In Musk’s filings, and redacted emails counter-shared by OpenAI this week (rapidly unredacted by AI systems such as Claude 3) this debate about the implications of AGI were at the centre of the agreement Musk believes Altman and team committed to in 2015. The tension at that time was a fear that Google, having acquired London based DeepMind, and with their vast resources, would be unstoppable. Sam and Elon believed that a viable challenger with an ‘open’ not-for-profit model was needed to save humanity from Google domination. Fast forward to today, and OpenAI are one of the most secretive labs around, may be about to release a near-AGI level system, and are directly powering the profits of the world’s most valuable company Microsoft.
Takeaway: AGI is going to be hard for a court of law to define, and like quantum computing or cold fusion, may always feel near but just out of reach. Unlike quantum computing or cold fusion, ‘AGI-like’ technology is in our pockets and on our desks today, technology that can emulate humans in many different ways. Capitalism and consumerism will drive this race on, no matter which company leads. We should at least be individually scrutinising these firms, and collectively questioning how we balance the risks and rewards of techno-capitalism.