Stop treating `AGI' as the north-star goal of AI research

The AI research community plays a vital role in shaping the scientific, engineering, and societal goals of AI research. In this position paper, we argue that focusing on the highly contested topic of ‘artificial general intelligence’ (‘AGI’) undermines our ability to choose effective goals. We identify six key traps—obstacles to productive goal setting—that are aggravated by AGI discourse: Illusion of Consensus, Supercharging Bad Science, Presuming Value-Neutrality, Goal Lottery, Generality Debt, and Normalized Exclusion. To avoid these traps, we argue that the AI research community needs to (1) prioritize specificity in scientific, engineering, and societal goals, (2) center pluralism about multiple worthwhile approaches to multiple valuable goals, and (3) foster innovation through greater inclusion of disciplines and communities. Therefore, the AI research community needs to stop treating “AGI” as the north-star goal of AI research.

Introduction. How can we ensure that AI research goals serve scientific, engineering, and societal needs? What constitutes good science in AI research? Who gets to shape AI research goals? What makes a research goal legitimate or worthwhile? In this position paper, we argue that a widespread emphasis on AGI threatens to undermine the ability of researchers to provide well-motivated answers to these questions. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in “achieving human-level ‘intelligence”’ as a “north-star goal” of the AI field (McCarthy et al., 1955; Morris et al., 2024). This goal is often referred to as “artificial general intelligence” (“AGI”) (Chollet, 2024a; Tibebu, 2025). Yet rather than helping the field converge around shared goals, AGI discourse has mired it in controversies. Researchers diverge on what AGI is and assumptions about goals and risks (Summerfield, 2023; Morris et al., 2024; Blili-Hamelin et al., 2024).

Discussion / Conclusion. Reason 3: Benefiting humans as the goal of technology. If the AI community nevertheless wants an overarching goal to strive towards, the goal should be the support and benefit of human beings. The goals of technology are shaped by people. Evidence-based approaches to examining whether technology effectively meets the needs of people—be they “users”, “consumers”, “patients”, “scholars”, or a myriad of business and social monikers—are well-established. In a quest to achieve AGI, communities often lose sight of the needs of people as a goal, in favor of focusing on just the technology. There is another, more ambitious reason to work towards consensus on supporting and benefiting human beings as a goal. We have noted the role of socially significant disagreements about the goals of technology in our third recommendation of inclusion. Processes ensuring that technology benefits humans have the potential to provide collectively legitimate responses to such disagreements.