How We Learn About AGI
Mollick Makes the Machines Figure It Out
Keeping up with AI is tough. Not just the endless releases of new AI models, but the adoption, the workflow shifts, and the ripple effects across law, clients, and the economy. Adoption, in particular, has felt like learning to breathe underwater. Recently, the changes have been time-consuming, submerged and immersive, practical and deeply infrastructural: new research habits, faster judgment calls, unfamiliar failure modes.
But every so often, something breaks through the personal immersion and reminds me that the state of the art on the surface is still important and moving fast. More often than not, it’s Prof. Ethan Mollick who sends that signal. His latest is a brief podcast discussion on AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) featuring a twitchy avatar of himself, an AI-generated host, and a conversation entirely researched, scripted, voiced, and produced by machine. Mollick writes:
Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, is badly defined and much debated.... As an experiment in both substance and form (and speaking of potentially intelligent machines) I delegated the work entirely to AI. I had Google Deep Research put together a really solid 26-page summary on the topic. I then had HeyGen turn it into a video podcast discussion between a twitchy AI-generated version of me and an AI-generated host. It’s not actually a bad discussion (though I don’t fully agree with AI-me), but every part of it, from the research to the video to the voices is 100% AI generated.
Watch his 6-minute ‘podcast’ here:
The rest of the surrounding article is worth following up on:
Are we at AGI? No, not by any reasonable definition. AGI may be very close, and it may be devastatingly consequential. But I suspect the more important threshold has already been crossed: AI is pulling away from us. Watching Mollick run to keep up, we can see that AI is producing more value than we know how to integrate. Our best response is now not about catching up, but about learning how to be carried gracefully, sustainably, and deliberately—for as long as the AI era has strength to power these changes.
Take it at your own pace, but learn how to take it.
As Mollick concludes (emphasis mine):
Technologies do not instantly change the world, no matter how compelling or powerful they are. Social and organizational structures change much more slowly than technology, and technology itself takes time to diffuse. Even if we have AGI today, we have years of trying to figure out how to integrate it into our existing human world.