Databricks co-founder wins prestigious ACM award, says 'AGI is here already'
techcrunch.com> “AGI is here already. It’s just not in a form that we appreciate,” he told TechCrunch.
Ok, then what is this?
> “On the one hand, it’s awesome. You can do so many things with it. It just does them automatically,” he said. But it’s also “a security nightmare” because its designed to mimic a human assistant that you trust with things like passwords. That leads to the risk of being hacked, or the agent spending unauthorized money from your bank because your browser is logged in.
> “Yeah, it’s not a little human there,” he says.
AGI is a meaningless term and it differs depending on who you are talking to. Even the rest of the article suggests the opposite of the claim that "AGI is here already".
The real fact is, it is not here, unless you mean it is here in the form of Databricks stock options, then of course he would say that.
Zaharia is a legitimately smart and impressive guy, totally deserving of the award, but it is a bit depressing to see what’s traditionally been an academic honor turn into a sales pitch.
To be fair he wasn’t very explicit about it, maybe not even trying to sound like a sales pitch, but that’s just what happens through osmosis when you spend all day at an enterprise focused on selling data governance solutions for the agentic era… also, he’s not wrong. The AGI claim is an exaggeration but the risk management implication is not.
If AGI _were_ truly here today, it would be exceptionally dangerous to let it run amuck in your enterprise… and if it comes any time in the next few years, it’ll be a time when a good chunk of corporate America has clicked through every OAuth screen in their organization to grant full access to some AI inference machine.