Even the ‘godmother of AI’ has no idea what AGI is

Are you confused about artificial general intelligence, or AGI? It’s that thing OpenAI is obsessed with ultimately creating in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” You may want to take them seriously since they just raised $6.6 billion to get closer to that goal.

In a wide ranging discussion on Thursday at Credo AI’s responsible AI leadership summit, Fei-Fei Li, a world-renowned researcher often called the “godmother of AI,” said she doesn’t know what AGI is either. At other points, Li discussed her role in the birth of modern AI, how society should protect itself against advanced AI models, and why she thinks her new unicorn startup World Labs is going to change everything.

“I come from academic AI and have been educated in the more rigorous and evidence-based methods, so I don’t really know what all these words mean,” said Li to a packed room in San Francisco, beside a big window overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. “I frankly don’t even know what AGI means. Like people say you know it when you see it, I guess I haven’t seen it. The truth is, I don’t spend much time thinking about these words because I think there’s so many more important things to do…”

If anyone would know what AGI is, it’s probably Fei-Fei Li. In 2006, she created ImageNet, the world’s first big AI training and benchmarking dataset that was critical for catalyzing our current AI boom. From 2017 to 2018, she served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Today, Li leads the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI) and her startup World Labs is building “large world models.” (That term is nearly as confusing as AGI, if you ask me.)

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