The Man Who Invented AGI

■ In this week's Backchannel: Everyone is obsessed with AGI—here's where it started. Also: The OG of AI, and whether others will follow OpenAI's tortured journey toward becoming more corporate.

I will accept the credit for the first citation and give them credit for a lot of other work that I didn't do, and maybe should have."

In the summer of 1956, a group of academics—now we'd call them computer scientists but there was no such thing then—met on Dartmouth College campus in New Hampshire to discuss how to make machines think like humans. One of them, John McCarthy, coined the term "artificial intelligence." This legendary meeting and the naming of a new field, is well known.

In this century, a variation of the term has stepped to the forefront: Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI—the stage at which computers can match or surpass human intelligence. AGI was the driver of this week's headlines: a deal between OpenAI and Microsoft that hinged on what happens if OpenAI achieves it; massive capital expenditures from Meta, Google, and Microsoft to pursue it; the thirst to achieve it helping Nvidia to become a $5 trillion company. US politicians have said if we don't get it before China does, we're cooked.

Prognosticators say we might get it before the decade is out and it will change everything. The origin of that term, however, and how it was originally defined, is not so well-known. But there is a clear answer to that question. The person who first came up with the most important acronym of the 21st Century so far—as well as a definition that is still pretty much the way we think of it today—is unfamiliar to just about everybody. This is his story.

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