There are all kinds of predictions by AI leaders on when humanity will achieve AGI, but a prominent CEO believes that these discussions are missing the big picture.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently offered a unique perspective on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its potential impact. Instead of focusing on benchmarks and timelines, Nadella emphasizes the economic implications of such a transformative technology. He argues current benchmarks are “meaningless” and proposes a bold new metric for AGI’s arrival: a 10% GDP growth rate in the developed world, mirroring the peak of the Industrial Revolution.
“I said that in response to all these benchmarks on AGI,” Nadella began. “First of all, all the values are saturated. It’s becoming slightly meaningless,” he said.
He continued, pivoting to a financial perspective: “But if you set that aside, let’s say you spend 100 billion dollars in capex and then you say, okay, you got to make a return on it. And then let’s just say roughly your make 100 billion dollars a year to on it. In order for you to make 100 billion dollars on it, then what’s the value you have to create, right, in order to make that? And it’s multiples of that, right?”
Nadella connected this return on investment to broad economic growth: “And so that ain’t going to happen unless and until there is broad spread economic growth in the world. So that’s why I kind of look at it and say my formula for when can we say AGI is arrived when, say, the developed world is growing at 10%, which may have been the peak of Industrial Revolution or what have you. That’s a good benchmark for me if you ask me what’s the benchmark.”
Nadella said that the gains from the AI revolution could end up being a lot more equitable than those from the industrial revolution. “And by the way, the one other thing that I’m excited about it this time around, it won’t be like the Industrial Revolution in the sense that is not going to be about the developed world or the global North and the global South. It’s going to be about the entire globe because, guess what, diffusion is so good that everybody is going to get it at the same time,” he said.
Different companies have given timelines on when they expect to acheive AGI. Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has said that AGI is possible in 5-10 years, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said that AGI will be achieved in 2026-2027. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, on the other hand, says his company knows what it has to do to create AGI, but it might be hard for humanity to tell when it’s been achieved. Elon Musk has said that AI systems will be smarter than any single human being by the end of 2025, and will likely be smarter than all human beings combined by 2027 or 2028. Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, meanwhile, has said that AGI will be achieved much sooner than in 2-3 years.
But Nadella’s perspective shifts the AGI conversation from abstract benchmarks to tangible economic outcomes. His 10% GDP growth benchmark is ambitious, considering the current economic climate and historical growth rates — it implies that AGI must not only automate tasks but also unlock entirely new avenues for value creation. It remains to be seen whether the 10 percent GDP growth bit does come to fruition, but Microsoft seems to be saying that it obsessing too much over AGI benchmarks might be the wrong way to look at the AI-induced changes that are appearing over the horizon.