AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be small and fast and energy efficient enough with our manufacturing capabilities today. A human brain has something like 80 or 90 billion of them and there are other types of cells that outnumber neurons by I think two orders of magnitude. The entire architecture is massively parallel and has a complex feedback network instead of the LLM’s rigid mostly forward processing. When I say massively parallel I don’t mean a billion tensor units. I mean a quintillion input superpositions.

And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run.

Given this I am not certain we will get to AGI by simulating it in a GPU or TPU. We would need a new hardware paradigm.

It's intellectual charlatanism or incompetence.

In the former case (charlatanism), it's basically marketing. Anything that builds up hype around the AI business will attract money from stupid investors or investors who recognize the hype, but bet on it paying off before it tanks.

In the latter case (incompetence), many people honestly don't know what it means to know something. They spend their entire lives this way. They honestly think that words like "emergence" bless intellectually vacuous and uninformed fascinations with the aura of Science!™. These kinds of people lack a true grasp of even basic notions like "language", an analysis of which already demonstrates the silliness of AI-as-intelligence.

Now, that doesn't mean that in the course of foolish pursuit, some useful or good things might not fall out as a side effect. That's no reason to pursue foolish things, but the point is that the presence of some accidental good fruits doesn't prove the legitimacy of the whole. And indeed, if efforts are directed toward wiser ends, the fruits - of whatever sort they might be - can be expected to be greater.

Talk of AGI is, frankly, just annoying and dumb, at least when it is used to mean bona fide intelligence or "superintelligence". Just hold your nose and take whatever gold there is in Egypt.

Yes - and the water used is largely non-consumptive.

The article is well worth reading. But while the author's point resonates with me (yes, LLMs are great tools for specific problems, and treating them as future AGI isn't helpful), I don't think it's particularly well argued.

Yes, the huge expected value argument is basically just Pascal's wager, there is a cost on the environment, and OpenAI doesn't take good care of their human moderators. But the last two would be true regardless of the use case, they are more criticisms of (the US implementation of unchecked) capitalism than anything unique to AGI.

And as the author also argues very well, solving today's problems isn't why OpenAI was founded. As a private company they are free to pursue any (legal) goal. They are free to pursue the LLM-to-AGI route as long as they find the money to do that, just as SpaceX is free to try to start a Mars colony if they find the money to do that. There are enough other players in the space focused in the here and now. Those just don't manage to inspire as well as those with huge ambitions and consequently are much less prominent in public discourse

I think the water usage argument can be pertinent depending on the context.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-cent...

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-...