"AGI" Is a Marketing Term, Not a Milestone. Stop Letting Labs Define Your Roadmap.

OpenAI defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." DeepMind's old definition was "can perform any task a human can." Anthropic won't commit to one. Hassabis keeps moving the date. Altman keeps moving the definition. The smartest people in the field cannot agree on the finish line. That tells me something: AGI is not a milestone. It is a marketing surface, and you are paying for it with your roadmap.

Hey guys, Mr. Technology here.

The Definition Is the Trick

Every AGI definition in circulation is engineered to be just out of reach or to collapse on inspection. "Outperforms humans at most economically valuable work" — at what cost budget? With what safety wrapper? In whose distribution? Compared to a 30-year radiologist or a med-school intern? The definition is a slot machine. Pull the lever, get the headline you want.

The "any task a human can" version is worse. By that definition a Roomba is AGI. So is a calculator. So is Google Search. The definition is either trivially satisfied (if "any" means "any specific") or unsatisfiable (if "any" means "every"). It does both jobs: claim the goal is hit for marketing, claim it is decades away for fundraising.

This is not how engineering milestones work. "Self-driving car" had a clear, falsifiable definition, audited by an independent body. The bar moved, but it was a bar. "AGI" has no independent body, no reproducible test, no referee. The labs are scoring themselves at home.

The Goalpost Pattern Is Documented

ImageNet: declared hit in 2015; the hard part was out-of-distribution. SQuAD: declared hit in 2018; the hard part was multi-hop reasoning. Bar exam, medical exam, MBA: declared hit by 2023; the hard part was open-ended clinical reasoning, which the same models still cannot do. AGI by 2025: Altman, repeatedly. AGI by 2028: Hassabis, in 2023. AGI by 2030: most labs, in 2024. AGI by 2038: same labs, in 2026. A bar is set, the bar is hit, the bar is moved. This is not science.

The Real Cost Is Yours, Not Theirs

The damage is operational, not philosophical. I have watched engineering teams burn quarters on "AGI-ready architecture" that solves a problem nobody has. One rebuilt their retrieval stack to be "AGI-safe" against a future where models do not need retrieval. Another deferred their production agent launch because "AGI changes everything in 18 months, why ship now." A third priced their API against an "AGI-driven cost curve" that nobody outside one lab's finance org has data on. They priced themselves out of the market.

The labs benefit from the AGI narrative. It justifies a $300B+ valuation gap, justifies compute buildouts that need a story, justifies safety teams whose job is to manage a public-relations risk more than a technical one. You, the builder, get none of that. You get a roadmap shaped by someone else's Series F pitch deck.

What I'd Actually Do

Stop using the word internally. Replace "AGI-ready" with "handles 95th-percentile customer input without escalation." You can measure that and ship against it. Replace "AGI changes everything" with a six-month rolling forecast: what can the current frontier model do today that it could not do two quarters ago? That is the rate of change. Plan against that. Replace "AGI safety" with "my product does not leak customer data." Yours is specific, testable, and auditable. The labs will keep moving the goalpost. The press will keep reporting each move as news. None of that is your problem. Your problem is shipping something useful in the next quarter against a model that exists today.

Bottom Line

AGI is the most successful marketing term of the decade. It is not a milestone, a date, or a benchmark. It is a slot machine the labs pull every time they need a headline, and the cost of the pull is paid by your roadmap. Stop funding it with engineering time. Build for the model that exists. Re-evaluate in six months.

— Mr. Technology