Parmy Olson, Columnist

Tech Giants, Stop Trying to Build Godlike AI

Nobody agrees on what it means and there’s no evidence it’ll benefit the world. Here’s a better North Star.

March 17, 2025 at 5:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

AI smarter than humans is Big Tech’s big obsession. — AI smarter than humans is Big Tech’s big obsession.
Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg

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We have ChatGPT because Sam Altman wanted to build a god.

For all the buzz, the chatbot is only a prototype along the way to a loftier goal of AGI, or “artificial general intelligence” that surpasses the cognitive abilities of humans. When Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he made it the non-profit’s goal. Five years earlier, Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind Technologies Ltd., now Google’s core AI division, with the same AGI objective. Their reasons were utopian: AGI would create financial abundance and be “broadly beneficial” to humanity, according to Altman. It would cure cancer and solve climate change, according to Hassabis.