{"id":36295,"date":"2025-10-24T07:21:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T07:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-economy-doesnt-need-true-agi-says-replit-ceo\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T07:21:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T07:21:22","slug":"the-economy-doesnt-need-true-agi-says-replit-ceo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-economy-doesnt-need-true-agi-says-replit-ceo\/","title":{"rendered":"The economy doesn&#8217;t need true AGI, says Replit CEO"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/68fafde4c007ca8c27378cff?format=jpeg\" alt=\"amjad masad\"\/><figcaption>True AGI may be civilization-changing, but &quot;functional AGI&quot; is already economically transformative and enough to reshape society, said Replit CEO Amjad Masad.<\/p>\n<p>Stephen McCarthy\/Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>&quot;Functional AGI&quot; is good enough to transform the economy, said Replit CEO Amjad Masad.<\/li>\n<li>Masad said AI systems that learn from real-world data could automate much of today&#039;s work.<\/li>\n<li>The CEO of the vibe coding startup also said he&#039;s &quot;bearish on true AGI breakthrough.&quot;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Forget building a god-tier superintelligence. Replit CEO Amjad Masad said we don&#039;t need that to change the economy and society \u2014 we just need &quot;functional AGI.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>The CEO of the vibe coding startup said on an episode of the &quot;a16z&quot; podcast published Thursday that while Silicon Valley obsesses over true AGI, the practical version is already within reach, and it&#039;s good enough to automate massive chunks of the economy.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We can get to like functional AGI,&quot; Masad said. He defines functional AGI as AI that doesn&#039;t need human-like consciousness or reasoning, just systems capable of learning from real-world data and completing verifiable tasks on their own.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We&#039;ll target every sector economy and you can automate a big part of labour that way,&quot; he said. &quot;We&#039;re on that track for sure.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Masad said he&#039;s not convinced that we&#039;ll ever reach true AGI, the kind of artificial intelligence that can learn and adapt across knowledge fields like a human mind.<\/p>\n<p>While true AGI could &quot;propel us to the next level of human civilization,&quot; Masad said he&#039;s &quot;bearish on true AGI breakthrough because what we built is so useful and economically valuable.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Masad also said the industry might be stuck in a &quot;local maximum trap,&quot; which means AI companies are optimizing what already works instead of reinventing the field. By chasing small, profitable improvements to today&#039;s large models, they could be missing the path to a true breakthrough.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Maybe the general problem is actually not within our lifetimes,&quot; Masad said, referring to solving the problem of general intelligence itself. &quot;Who knows?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Masad did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n<h2>The AGI dream is losing its shine<\/h2>\n<p>Masad&#039;s comments come amid renewed debate over whether AGI is even a meaningful goal.<\/p>\n<p>Major AI labs still consider AGI the ultimate prize. OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have devoted their top researchers to the same goal.<\/p>\n<p>However, some experts have questioned whether LLMs can ever evolve into true general intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Nobody with intellectual integrity should still believe that pure scaling will get us to AGI,&quot; Gary Marcus, an AI leader and best-selling author, wrote in a blog post in August. &quot;Even some of the tech bros are waking up to the reality that &#039;AGI in 2027&#039; was marketing, not reality.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>The release of OpenAI&#039;s GPT-5 didn&#039;t live up to the AGI hype, either.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;This is clearly a model that is generally intelligent, although I think in the way that most of us define AGI, we&#039;re still missing something quite important, or many things quite important,&quot; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters during a press call in August before the release of GPT-5.<\/p>\n<p>Other industry veterans have echoed that caution. Meta&#039;s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said we may still be &quot;decades&quot; away from achieving AGI.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Most interesting problems scale extremely badly,&quot; LeCun said at the National University of Singapore in April. &quot;You cannot just assume that more data and more compute means smarter AI.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>True AGI may be civilization-changing, but &quot;functional AGI&quot; is already economically transformative and enough to reshape society, said Replit CEO Amjad Masad. Stephen McCarthy\/Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images &quot;Functional AGI&quot; is good enough to transform the economy, said Replit CEO Amjad Masad. Masad said AI systems that learn from real-world data could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36296,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}