At Technology Review, senior editor Will Douglas Heaven offers a corrective to the continuous yelp in legacy media that AGI — machines that think like people — is just around the corner:

For many, AGI is more than just a technology. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, it’s talked about in mystical terms. Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. And he feels it more than most: In 2024, he left OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, to cofound Safe Superintelligence, a startup dedicated to figuring out how to avoid a so-called rogue AGI (or control it when it comes). Superintelligence is the hot new flavor—AGI but better! —introduced as talk of AGI becomes commonplace.

“How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time,” October 30, 2025

Scaling Up is Not Going to Make Large Language Models Intelligent

Mind Matters News readers who have followed the work of Gary Smith (here, for example) will certainly know better. But fame and fortune lie in spinning the tale that terrifies, not reporting the plain old facts.

Heaven is blunt:

Here’s what I think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.

I have been reporting on artificial intelligence for more than a decade, and I’ve watched the idea of AGI bubble up from the backwaters to become the dominant narrative shaping an entire industry. A onetime pipe dream now props up the profit lines of some of the world’s most valuable companies and thus, you could argue, the US stock market. It justifies dizzying down payments on the new power plants and data centers that we’re told are needed to make the dream come true. Fixated on this hypothetical technology, AI firms are selling us hard. “Conspiracy theory“

How is the belief a conspiracy theory rather than just a sales job? Because, he notes, is that the AI enthusiasts wholeheartedly believe in AGI and all disconfirmations are ignored. His own view?

In a lot of ways, I think the whole idea of AGI is built on a warped view of what we should expect technology to do, and even what intelligence is in the first place. Stripped back to its essentials, the argument for AGI rests on the premise that one technology, AI, has gotten very good, very fast, and will continue to get better. But set aside the technical objections—what if it doesn’t continue to get better?—and you’re left with the claim that intelligence is a commodity you can get more of if you have the right data or compute or neural network. And it’s not. “Conspiracy theory“

The Valley forgets to factor in that everything in this universe has its limits…