AI Investor Reveals: Why I’m Steering Clear of AGI Investments

An article we liked from Thought Leader Rob May of Half Court Ventures:

Why I Don't Invest in AGI - It's Not The Biggest Economic Opportunity

Value will accrue to the use cases of AGI - not the platform that creates it first.

If you make AI investments, you inevitably see a regular flow of companies who list their corporate mission as “solving AGI” (artificial general intelligence) or something like that. I usually don’t take a second look at these businesses - not because it isn’t an important goal, but because I don’t think it’s a good economic opportunity. That sounds crazy right? What could be more valuable than building the world’s first machine that is as intelligent as a human?

The Singularity

Let’s first look at the core theory behind why AGI is perceived to be so powerful. It’s often called “the singularity.” There are many perspectives on this but they generally looking something like this:

The first machine to reach human intelligence will then start improving itself on its own, without human intervention
Having even a brief head start of a few hours or days will make it a winner-take-all outcome as the first truly intelligent machine will take off on a self-improvement curve so that no one can catch up
An AGI machine will be capable of so many things that it will dominate many areas of economic activity.

AGI Economic Skepticism

I have to admit that years ago, in older versions of this newsletter, I was a believer in the singularity and I thought companies and academic labs might be in a race that mattered immensely to the future of the world. But after almost a decade now of working at the intersection of AI and business in various forms, I no longer feel this way. Here are my main arguments for AGI economic skepticism.

The gap between the top AI groups is small, so I’m skeptical that the first group to solve AGI will do something that others can’t figure out and copy quickly.
It’s not obvious or guaranteed that the first machine to reach AGI will also be the best at self improvement. Humans obviously don’t know exactly what to do to build AGI, and so building a machine with human levels of intelligence doesn’t...