"AGI" is Decades Old and It Never Found a Viable Business Model or Real, Actually Useful Use Cases
Bluffers and charlatans are selling again the same stuff that failed to gain adoption decades ago (for very good reasons)
3+ years ago we called it "chaff". Chatbots were "chaffbots". Sometimes we still use those terms, but we've more or less settled on "slop" and may have coined "slopfarms" because that concept (and literal term) is widely understood and accepted, so it's easier to communicate that to/with people. Anything to avoid calling it "intelligence" because it has none of that (some have called LLMs "words calculators"). RMS has suggested "pretend intelligence" (PI), but that still repeats the assumption that it emulates actual intelligence and we've seen RMS et al saying "stochastic parrots" - LXO has since told me they didn't coin that but instead borrowed the term. RMS more frequently refers to LLMs as "BS generators". Maybe not so "SFW", but at least catchy...
23 years ago I began my Ph.D. studies and did "artificial" "intelligence" in the area of image analysis, having done the same years earlier in the context of game development (before the media started referring to the movement of one's enemies inside games as "AI"). We studied and explained entropy. We dealt with chains of numbers and did statistical analysis of them (e.g. Principal Component Analysis). None of this is new and I keep reminding people of local firms (right here in Manchester) doing the same thing the media now calls "AGI"... more than 2 decades ago!!! Genemation (Ltd) is connected to some of my colleagues at the time. They never found a business model for what they had created. Today, in 2026, the companies that repackage/market the same thing as "HEY HI REVOLUTION" still cannot find a business model, only gullible shareholders that are willing to lose trillions because they bought into an illusion. They misuse people's savings and pensions [1, 2] to make climate-destroying white elephants. The repository below now contains close to 1,000 news references. █
