It doesn’t appear that Thiel is saying AGI won’t happen. Rather he observes that people are talking about it much less now than they were (presumably because St

It doesn’t appear that Thiel is saying AGI won’t happen. Rather he observes that people are talking about it much less now than they were (presumably because Strong AI is still far off); and furthermore that it’s not that important to him as a startup investor because of the massive scale of data and compute resources required. Implicitly, I take him as acknowledging that the multi-trillion dollar surveillance AI companies have the scale, the reach, and the time to make gradual progress towards AGI. These are reasonable notions, even weak AI is sufficient to potentially upend the world economic and social order. Frankly, if true AGI were to materialize within the next decade, we would be ill-equipped to cope with the repercussions. I do, however, believe that many if not most AI pessimists are disconnected from the progress being made on a wide range of critical fronts.