In the summer of 1956, a group of academics—now we’d call them computer scientists but there was no such thing then—met on Dartmouth College campus in New Hampshire to discuss how to make machines think like humans. One of them, John McCarthy, coined the term “artificial intelligence.” This legendary meeting and the naming of a new field, is well known.
In this century, a variation of the term has stepped to the forefront: artificial general intelligence, or AGI—the stage at which computers can match or surpass human intelligence. AGI was the driver of this week’s headlines: a deal between OpenAI and Microsoft that hinged on what happens if OpenAI achieves it; massive capital expenditures from Meta, Google, and Microsoft to pursue it; the thirst to achieve it helping Nvidia to become a $5 trillion company. US politicians have said if we don’t get it before China does, we’re cooked. Prognosticators say we might get it before the decade is out, and it will change everything. The origin of that term, however, and how it was originally defined, is not so well-known. But there is a clear answer to that question. The person who first came up with the most important acronym of the 21st century so far— as well as a definition that is still pretty much the way we think of it today—is unfamiliar to just about everybody. This is his story.
Nano Nerd
In 1997, Mark Gubrud was obsessed with nanotechnology and its perils. He was a fanboy of Eric Drexler, who popularized the science of the very very small. Gubrud began attending nanotech conferences. His particular concern was how that technology, and other cutting-edge science, could be developed as dangerous weapons of war. “I was a grad student sitting in the sub-sub basement at the University of Maryland, listening to a huge sump pump come on and off very loudly, right behind my desk, and reading everything that I could,” he tells me on a Zoom call from the porch of a cabin in Colorado.
That same year, Gubrud submitted and presented a paper at the Fifth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, called “Nanotechnology and International Security.” He argued that breakthrough technologies will redefine international conflicts, making them potentially more catastrophic than nuclear war. He urged nations to “give up the warrior tradition.” The new sciences he discussed included nanotechnology, of course, but also advanced AI—which he referred to as, yep, “artificial general intelligence.” It seems that no one had previously employed that phrase. Later in the paper he defined it:
“By advanced artificial general intelligence, I mean AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed, that can acquire, manipulate and reason with general knowledge, and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be needed.”
Drop the last clause and you have the definition of AGI that most people use today.