Databricks CEO says we already have artificial general intelligence. Silicon Valley just refuses to admit it.
Ali Ghodsi said at Goldman Sachs’ Communicopia + Technology Conference in September that AI chatbots already meet the definition of AGI — AI that can reason like a human — that researchers used a decade ago.
“Everybody would say yes, but we kept moving the goalposts,” Ghodsi said in the discussion, which was published Tuesday.
“Since we kind of achieved it, let’s come up with something even bigger,” he added, referring to the push toward superintelligence — AI that can reason far smarter than humans.
Ghodsi, who holds a doctorate in computer science, said the industry’s goal of superintelligence is nowhere close using today’s techniques. He also said the fixation with superintelligence is “misdirected,” adding that building systems to outsmart the world’s brightest minds isn’t what companies actually need.
AGI “has everything we need to be able to automate and build the agents,” he said. “We just need to do the boring work,” he added.
San Francisco-based Databricks raised $1 billion in September, which valued the company at over $100 billion.
Ghodsi said at the conference that the era of giant leaps from AI models has slowed. The scaling laws that powered the last several years of AI progress have clearly “come to a stop,” and newer systems like OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude 4 aren’t delivering massive improvements.
“It’s getting harder and harder to get value out of the next pre-trained giant model,” he said.
The debate on superintelligence
Ghodsi’s comments come as the industry splits over whether building artificial superintelligence is even desirable.
Microsoft AI CEO said on an episode of the “Silicon Valley Girl Podcast” published Saturday that artificial superintelligence should be treated as an “anti-goal.”
Superintelligence “doesn’t feel like a positive vision of the future,” said Mustafa Suleyman. “It would be very hard to contain something like that or align it to our values.”
Suleyman, who cofounded DeepMind before moving to Microsoft, said his team is instead aiming for what he calls “humanist superintelligence” — one that is grounded in human interest and values.
Other tech leaders are determined to achieve superintelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that the company is building toward superintelligence, not stopping at AGI.
“Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity,” Altman said in January.
Altman said in an interview in September that he would be very surprised if the industry had not reached superintelligence by 2030. Altman has long described AGI as OpenAI’s central mission.
Google DeepMind’s cofounder, Demis Hassabis, has put forward a similar timeline. He said in April that AGI could arrive “in the next five to 10 years,” describing a future where AI systems understand the world “in very nuanced and deep ways” and are woven into everyday life.
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