One of the most influential figures in artificial intelligence just said the quiet part out loud: this technology that’s attracted hundreds of billions in investment is “highly limited” and won’t be replacing humans anytime soon.
Andrew Ng, who co-founded Google Brain and taught the likes of Sam Altman, is calling bullsh*t on the AGI hype train—and coming from him, that actually means something.
WHAT’S GOING ON: In an interview with NBC News, Ng pushed back hard against fellow tech leaders who claim artificial general intelligence is just a few years away.
“I look at how complex the training recipes are and how manual AI training and development is today, and there’s no way this is going to take us all the way to AGI just by itself,” he said.
This directly contradicts figures like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei—both of whom Ng has actually mentored—who’ve been promising AGI is imminent.
THE DETAILS: Ng isn’t some random skeptic. The man has over 2.3 million LinkedIn followers, founded Coursera, taught at Stanford, and was chief scientist at Baidu.
When he says “the tricky thing about AI is that it is amazing and it is also highly limited,” he’s not doom-posting—he’s speaking from decades of actually building this stuff. He even acknowledged that parts of today’s AI landscape “look like a bubble,” particularly around the expensive training phase.
“When will the payoff for all of the capital expenses going into this training, when will they pay off?” he asked. Good question!
BUT BUT BUT: Ng isn’t exactly a tech critic. He’s still bullish overall, dismissing concerns about AI-related suicides as “one or two anecdotes” that shouldn’t lead to “stifling regulations.”
He prefers transparency requirements over actual safety rules—convenient for an investor whose portfolio benefits from minimal oversight. “I think for a lot of AI models, the benefit is so much greater than the harm,” he said. (Tell that to the families of teenagers who died after interactions with AI chatbots.)
WHY IT MATTERS: When an AI insider admits the hype machine is outpacing reality, pay attention. The tech industry has poured trillions into infrastructure based on promises of imminent superintelligence.
Now one of the field’s godfathers is saying that timeline is fantasy.
Meanwhile, workers are being displaced, regulations are being gutted, and companies keep extracting investment based on vaporware promises.
BOTTOM LINE: Even the architects of this revolution know they’re overselling it. The question is whether anyone with actual power will pump the brakes before the bubble bursts—and working people are left holding the bag while Silicon Valley cashes out.