I think the AI industry is facing a handful of urgent problems it’s not addressing adequately. I believe everything I write here is at least directionally true, but I could be wrong. My aim isn’t to be definitive, just to spark a conversation. What follows is a set of expanded thoughts on those problems, in no particular order.
Disclaimer: Not everyone in AI is as bad as I’m making them sound. I’m flattening a wildly diverse field into a single tone, which is obviously reductive. People are different. Nobody reading this will see themselves in everything I say, and I don’t expect them to. My focus is mostly on the voices steering the public discourse. They have an overdimensioned impact on what the world feels and thinks about AI.
Second disclaimer: I want to express my frustrations with the industry as someone who would love to see it doing well. One thing is to alienate those who hate you—a hate that’s become louder and widespread over time—and a different thing to annoy those who don’t. I hold no grudge against AI as a technology nor as an industry, and that’s precisely why I’m writing this.
I. Talent churn reveals short AGI timelines are wish, not belief
The revolving door of top AI researchers suggests that many of them don’t believe artificial general intelligence (AGI) is happening soon.
This is huge. AGI’s imminence is almost a premise in AI circles. To give you concrete numbers, AI CEOs like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis say AGI is 1-5 years away, and they represent the conservative camps. The Metaculus community prediction (1,500+ forecasters) has settled in May 2031. The authors of “AI 2027” converge at, well, 2027.
However, despite what’s said in public, the OpenAI-Meta talent wars (job hopping has been playing out across the entire sector to a lesser degree for years) are consistent with the belief that AGI is still many years away. (There are outlier exceptions like scientist Ilya Sutskever, who didn't sell out even for $32 billion.)
If they truly believed we’re at most five years from world-transforming AI, they wouldn’t be switching jobs, no matter how large the pay bump (they’re already affluent). I say money, but I mean for whatever reason. I don’t want to imply they’re doing it out of greed; the point is that their actions don’t match their claims, regardless of the underlying motive.
This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI. Their stated AGI timelines are “at the latest, in a few years,” but their revealed timelines are “it’ll happen at some indefinite time in the future.”
I’m basically calling the AI industry dishonest, but I want to qualify by saying they are unnecessarily dishonest. Because they don’t need to be! They should just not make abstract claims about how much the world will change due to AI in no time, and they will be fine. They undermine the real effort they put into their work—which is genuine!
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