The Man Who Invented AGI

Wang, who now teaches at Temple University, says he only vaguely remembers the discussion but says he might have suggested some alternatives. More importantly, he tells me that what those contributors dubbed AGI in circa 2002 is “basically the original AI.” The Dartmouth founders envisioned machines that would express intelligence with the same breadth as humans did. “We needed a new label because the only one had changed its common usage,” he says.

The die was cast. “We all started using it in some online forums, this phrase AGI,” says Legg. (He didn’t always use it: “I never actually mentioned AGI in my PhD thesis, because I thought it would be too controversial,” he says.) Goerztel’s book, Artificial General Intelligence, didn’t come out until mid-decade, but by then the term was taking off, with a journal and conference by that name.

Gubrud did manage to claim credit in naming AGI. In the mid-2000s, Gubrud himself called it to the attention of those popularizing the term. As Legg puts it, “Somebody pops up out of the woodwork and says, ‘Oh, I came up with the term in ‘97,' and we're like, 'Who the hell are you?' And then sure enough, we looked it up, and he had a paper that had it. So [instead of inventing it] I kind of reinvented the term." (Legg of course is the cofounder and chief AGI scientist at Google’s DeepMind.)

Gubrud attended the second AGI conference in 2006 and met Goertzel briefly. He never met Legg, though over the years he occasionally interacted with him online, always in a friendly manner. Gubrud understands that his own lack of follow-up edged him out of the picture.

“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—but that wasn't my focus.” he says. “My concern was the arms race. The whole point of writing that paper was to warn about that.” Gubrud hasn’t been prolific in producing work after that—his career has been peripatetic, and he now spends a lot of time caring for his mother—but he has authored a number of papers arguing for a ban on autonomous killer robots and the like.

Gubrud can’t ignore the dissonance between his status and that of the lords of AGI. “It’s taking over the world, worth literally trillions of dollars,” he says. “And I am a 66-year-old with a worthless PhD and no name and no money and no job.” But Gubrud does have a legacy. He gave a name to AGI. His definition still stands. And his warnings about its dangers are still worth listening to.

This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.