Is AGI a hoax of Silicon Valley?
Introducing: The New Generation of "AGI Startups"
Welcome Back,
Everyone from OpenAI to DeepSeek claims they are an AGI startup, but the way these AI startups are proliferating is starting to get out of control in 2025. I asked Futuristic Lawyer
, to look into this trend.On 14 April 2023, High-Flyer announced the start of an artificial general intelligence lab dedicated to research developing AI tools separate from High-Flyer's financial business. Incorporated on 17 July 2023, with High-Flyer as the investor and backer, the lab became its own company, DeepSeek.
But while saying you are an AGI research lab has come into popular fashion in marketing terms in recent years, does anyone even believe AGI is a real thing or that today’s architecture even has the capability of attaining it?
The definition of and the date when it is achieved are both hotly debated. However it seems actual machine learning engineers and researchers don’t actually think the current LLM architecture can reach this apparent goal.
How AI Researchers view AGI
According to a recent survey of 475 AI researchers by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conducted as part of its panel on the future of AI research found that “[t]he majority of respondents (76%) assert that ‘scaling up current AI approaches’ to yield AGI is ‘unlikely’ or ‘very unlikely’ to succeed, suggesting doubts about whether current machine learning paradigms are sufficient for achieving general intelligence.”
The “Creating Einstein in a Datacenter” Problem
Maxwell Zeff of TechCrunch recently wrote a great analysis of this. In a piece this month, Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief science officer, called some parts of Amodei’s vision “wishful thinking at best.”
In Wolf’s opinion shared by Yann LeCun (and too many others to name), today’s LLMs simply aren’t up to the task (of AGI).
“I am not interested anymore in LLMs. They are just token generators and those are limited because tokens are in discrete space. I am more interested in next-gen model architectures, that should be able to do 4 things: understand physical world, have persistent memory and ultimately be more capable to plan and reason.” - Yann LeCun, Nvidia GTC, 2025
However comparing models to PhDs (which is absurd on the face of it) to promises of AGI aren’t stopping AI startups from raising huge funding rounds. Silicon Valley is in the business of sales, and Sam Altman is like a drunken sailor of false promises. This grift to Venture Funds and the public hasn’t just been a kind of Silicon Valley hallucination or hoax, it’s led to BigTech spending tens of Billions on AI Infrastructure.
It’s shaping up to be a very expensive narrative.
“To create an Einstein in a data center, we don’t just need a system that knows all the answers, but rather one that can ask questions nobody else has thought of or dared to ask.” - Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face.
The AGI Startups
The spin-offs from OpenAI seem to be more keen to wear the AGI mantle.
The recent statements of Anthropic’s CEO have been especially concerning. While OpenAI itself might be the ultimate pretender, pretending that you are building something essential that enables AGI to take place is getting fairly popular in 2024 and 2025 as well:
We now have a legion of so-called AGI startups
Generative AI investment reached over $56 billion in venture capital funding alone in 2024. How much will it reach in 2025? How much will Capex for datacenters and AI Infrastructure increase in the frantic years ahead?
My Proposed List of AGI Startups
The person at Microsoft who wrote the “Sparks of AGI” paper even ended up joining OpenAI. Microsoft first investing vast sums of money in OpenAI in April, 2023 signaled the start of a new kind of grifting culture in Silicon Valley, that has even spread to China in 2025.
Anthropic by seven co-founders (now Billionaires)
xAI by Elon Musk ⭐
Safe SuperIntelligence (SSI) by Ilya Sutskever ⭐
Thinking Machines Lab by Mira Murati ⭐
Ndea by François Chollet ⭐
DeepSeek by Liang Wenfeng
Reflection AI by Misha Laskin
Moonshot AI by Yang Zhilin and Zhang Yutao
Zhipu AI by Tang Jie and Li Juanzi
Care to estimate the total amount in U.S. dollars the above startups are going to raise in their lifetime? It’s going to be a staggering amount. These are the research labs that I most consider aligned with being an “AGI startup” as of March, 2025. They are likely to keep multiplying, some of them even taking robotics form, e.g. Generalist AI.
These companies aren’t building machines of loving grace and their efforts are very likely going to waste a lot of valuable capital, human talent, and time. Dario Amodei, the CEO and cofounder of Anthropic recently claimed AI will write 90% of code in 3-6 months and nearly all code within a year, potentially transforming software development that impacts the industry significantly.
This is clearly serious business! The founder of Reflection AI didn’t think AGI was even good enough, they called their startup a Superintelligence startup, previously only dared by Ilya Sutskever himself. Thinking Machines Lab by Mira Murati in fact is so serious, it needs dozens of former OpenAI employees to get off the ground running. After the commercial success of Anthropic (the first spin-off of the OpenAI Mafia), anything goes! 🚀
Futuristic Lawyer
On Futuristic Lawyer Newsletter, Tobias Jensen writes about the knowledge gap between big tech companies and democratic institutions.
"The vast investments in scaling, unaccompanied by any comparable efforts to understand what was going on, always seemed to me to be misplaced," Stuart Russel, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who helped organize the report, told New Scientist.
BigTech and now European and Chinese capex in AI Infrastructure and the funding of these “AGI startups” is starting to get out of control in 2025. Even when there is consensus that scaling up LLMs won’t lead to anything approaching AGI.
François Chollet himself a founder on our list with Ndea, as himself argued that while AI might be capable of memorizing reasoning patterns, it’s unlikely it can generate “new reasoning” based on novel situations. Just don’t tell that to Japanese based Sakana AI. These young prodigies from either OpenAI or Google, usually have commercial interests in pretending otherwise. Ndea itself plans to use a technique called program synthesis, in tandem with other technical approaches, to unlock AGI.
Articles by Tobias Jensen
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In this article, Tobias Jensen does a deep dive on some of the AGI startups worth mentioning in 2025:
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