People keep calling basic automation 'AGI' and it's messing up the conversation

I've seen at least five articles this week where a simple chatbot update or a new sorting tool gets labeled as a step toward artificial general intelligence. It's not. My team worked on a project last year that used a large language model to draft emails, and the client kept asking when it would 'become self-aware'. That's a huge jump. When we mix up narrow AI with AGI, it sets wild expectations and makes real progress harder to see. Has anyone else had to explain this gap to people outside the field?

2 comments

2 Comments

angelab623d ago

Honestly, I used to get caught up in the hype too. I'd see a cool new AI feature and think we were so close to something real, like a smart assistant from a movie. But then my friend showed me how the fancy recipe generator she uses just mixes words from a database, it can't actually taste or understand food. That really made it click for me. Now I see how calling that stuff AGI just confuses everyone.

hayden7203d ago

What if the real danger is that calling it AGI makes us treat it like a partner instead of a tool? We might stop double-checking its work because we assume it "understands" like a person, but it's just guessing based on patterns (like that recipe thing). That blind trust could cause real problems.