Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Declassified

For AI capex to get ROI, we need to see and do "AGI" sooner rather than later.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are uniquely positioned to raise the capital required to accelerate the approach to AGI.

Good Morning,

• I want to go over some of the AI News worth knowing about before I share some thoughts about AGI.

• In my various Notes I’m slipping in various AI news updates, so follow me there too if you are into that sort of thing.

• Don’t forget I also have a community chat, that’s fairly active. I ask my readers provocative questions about AI.

While OpenAI’s for-profit pivot hangs in the balance, one 23- year old YouTuber has become an AGI Podcaster/Youtuber, and by the way I think this is great, and hilarious!

Dwarkesh Patel

is a super interesting AGI interviewer now: Watch: Mark Zuckerberg – Meta's AGI Plan.

AGI is trending. 🚀 (And I’m not entirely sure how we should feel about this)

Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has become an Apple bull, with Meta AI devices I can understand why.

Meta goes all-in on AI and Wearables

The reason this is interesting is because while Microsoft and Amazon appear to have scaled back AI Infrastructure plans, Meta has increased them. They just did earnings so let me explain.

• Meta just launched a stand-alone AI app to compete with ChatGPT

• Meta increased its 2025 capital expenditures to come in between the range of $64 billion to $72 billion due in part to “an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware.”

• Microsoft’s Azure Cloud growth saw monster 33% growth. This for them is assurance that their AI Infrastructure spend (also called “capex”) is worth it.

This means that AI capex is not showing signs of slowing down in the race for AGI in the first half of 2025. This has big implications even if we are heading into a recession. Tariffs and trade wars appear to increase AI capex significantly or by about 11.2% approximately so far (going by Meta’s adjustment)!

What we do know is Meta will pivot to try to be an AI wearables company too, as demand for their smart glasses was higher than expected. Most of their so-called AI users are just on WhatsApp or Instagram maybe using some Generative AI features in passing. Now with a dedicated AI app and more AI wearables, things are about to get interesting for Meta’s so-called AI pivot (post Metaverse).

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen 3

• Lost as usual in the Western AI news cycle are important Chinese open-source releases, Qwen 3 is an epic announcement.

• Their flagship model is a mouthful: Qwen3-30B-A3B

Basically it’s one of the best open-weight models out of China. They claim that Qwen3-235B-A22B, achieves competitive results in benchmark evaluations of coding, math, general capabilities, etc., when compared to other top-tier models such as DeepSeek-R1, o1, o3-mini, Grok-3, and Gemini-2.5-Pro.

While some uncertainty exists around Nvidia; Google, Meta and Microsoft all beat on Earnings as expected meaning for datacenters it’s likely all speed ahead even with more expenses added on due to semiconductor supply-chain disruptions due to trade wars.

My Favorite Quote of the Week

One of my favorite quotes this past week is Nvidia’s CEO saying China is not behind in AI. I’ve been thinking about this due to Huawe’s new AI chip which I covered here. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that “China is not behind” in artificial intelligence, and that Huawei is “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world.”

Speaking to reporters at a tech conference in Washington, D.C., Huang said China may be “right behind” the U.S. for now, but it’s a narrow gap. “We are very close,” he said. “Remember this is a long-term, infinite race.”

Huawei has started delivering its CloudMatrix 384 AI Clusters to customers already. Nvidia’s prime challenger might not be AMD, but actually Huawei in the 2030s, or even earlier.

OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic claims AI Supremacy like Future revenues

Here is OpenAI’s expected revenue trajectory. We can expect many new products in 2026 it seems.

The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-forecasts-revenue-topping-125-billion-2029-agents-new-products-gain

Also while OpenAI is making odd claims about future revenue (see above), so is Meta: Meta forecasted it would make $1.4T in revenue from generative AI by 2035. AGI isn’t just a MAGA moonshot, it’s how BigTech keeps in power.

Soul-Searching our way to AGI

While BigTech and AI startups claim AGI soon, the way we are actually using¹ Generative AI might surprise you.

People aren’t using ChatGPT for mind blowing enhancements of their intelligence, but rather more for personal problem solving and mental health interventions in 2025. Soul-Searching our way to AGI means data harvesting² of our mental health and psychological profiles by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. This will lead to advertising revenue for them later down the line.

How we use ChatGPT (or Claude or Gemini for that matter) differently is changing quarter to quarter a lot, so everything is still very much in flux. [see above graphic and HBR article here].

AI News in a Nutshell - in brief: 4:26

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Where to go Next to Read about AGI?

Further Reading on AgI

Articles on AGI related themes recently around the Stack:

• 🌻 agi (disambiguation) by @jasmine Sun

• Agents are here, but a world with AGI is still hard to imagine by

  Harry Law

• AGI versus “broad, shallow intelligence” by Gary Marcus

• Our first project: AI 2027 by Daniel Kokotajlo

• Why I’m writing a Book about AGI by

  Kevin Roose

• Introducing AI 2027 by Scott Alexander (also a LessWrong graduate bro)

• And honestly, so many more.

😕 Event disclosure: This AGI piece was my humble submission to The Substack Post for their Unstacked Series. Unfortunately it didn’t make the cut.

• Though you might want to read this.

• The complete AGI breakdown for beginners

• How will we know when we have arrived at AGI?

• What AI writers on Substack are saying about AGI.