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Glossary: Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the name given to an upcoming technology that would be able to solve all sorts of problems, like a human, and unlike more specialized existing artificial intelligence (AI). In a sense, AGI is closer to depiction of AI in movies and in the public's mind.

Originally my question was about valuation but I was told this is not allowed here. So I am only asking about existing investments in artificial general intelligence.

Company or VC names are optional.

The main point is to get more information about artificial general intelligence economics.

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  • $\begingroup$ This is too opinion based. One can say for sure that if this technology is provided at competitive markets it will generate returns that roughly correspond to its marginal product as that can be said generally about any capital investment. What those returns will be in concrete terms is pure speculation. $\endgroup$
    – 1muflon1 ♦
    Sep 16 '20 at 13:12
  • $\begingroup$ What about current investments? Are not they based on potential returns? $\endgroup$
    – Winston
    Sep 16 '20 at 13:15
  • $\begingroup$ they are for sure based on expected returns but observed returns will rarely if ever correspond to expected returns and sometimes that is even impossible. For example, consider investment where with 50% investing 100e yields 150e and another 50% where it yields only the original 100e back. So expected amount of money you get back is 125e and expected return 25% but note in reality it’s not even possible to actually get return 25% in reality the ex post return can be only either 0% or 50%. This aside if your question were not opinion based it would be too broad in my opinion $\endgroup$
    – 1muflon1 ♦
    Sep 16 '20 at 13:23
  • $\begingroup$ I understand this is opinion based, but I could say the same of a question like "is it worth buying apple shares?" or "how the smartphone market is envisioned to evolve during the next months?". Yet, people are paid to answer those questions. They study the market and based on what they find, ie. based on the best of their knowledge they give an opinion. I am asking for an educated opinion, if you will, not a magical number. Is that prohibited? Should I limit my question to current investments only? $\endgroup$
    – Winston
    Sep 16 '20 at 13:31
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    $\begingroup$ I’m voting to close this question because it is better suited here ai.stackexchange.com/questions/23620/… $\endgroup$
    – Bayesian
    Sep 16 '20 at 19:39
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I agree with @1muflon1's comment that this is quite broad, because AGI can be defined in many different ways. For instance, do we consider simple learning tasks as AGI or metacognition?

This is a brief survey of AGI startups, but another point to keep in mind is that few startups/firms are actually gunning for AGI because we generally have problems in other, "easier" subfields of machine learning. For example, there are still difficulties with reinforcement learning for robotics or few-shot learning, both of which are much more specific tasks than AGI.

In sum, it's hard to provide good estimates because 1) the sum of money is likely to be small and 2) AGI is often defined broadly and used more in pop culture than by technical researchers.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the paper, definitely worth reading even though it does not answer my question. Apparently DeepMind is worth $500 million, which is not that small. $\endgroup$
    – Winston
    Sep 17 '20 at 12:53
  • $\begingroup$ I think whats important to note though is that Deepmind really is not AGI - it's foundational AI, which some consider separate. AGI really is considered far off, and I'm not sure how to characterize it to people outside of technical backgrounds $\endgroup$
    – C. Kang
    Sep 18 '20 at 20:49
  • $\begingroup$ Like, I don't think any researcher really expects AGI to emerge even within the next 10 to 20 years - people have said a 50/50 chance by 2040-60 in this article $\endgroup$
    – C. Kang
    Sep 18 '20 at 20:50

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