Hugging Face's Mitchell co-signs call to drop AGI north star

Sixteen researchers, working across Hugging Face, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Canadian bank TD, and several universities, have published a paper telling the AI field to stop treating 'AGI' as its north-star goal. Three of them sat with Justin Hendrix at Tech Policy Press on March 9, 2025 to explain why.

The argument starts with a plain complaint about language. 'This AGI term doesn't have a very concrete meaning, but it does function as a narrative for people to prioritize their own interests,' Margaret Mitchell, Hugging Face's chief ethics scientist, told the podcast. Her co-author Eryk Salvaggio, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, put it more bluntly: 'by not defining what artificial general intelligence is in real terms, you get to do all kinds of things and pretend that it's AGI.' Salvaggio goes further in the interview: 'AGI is literally not a technology at the moment. AGI is a political organization.'

The paper, 'Stop treating AGI as the north-star goal of AI research,' names six specific 'traps' that AGI discourse aggravates: Illusion of Consensus, Supercharging Bad Science, Presuming Value-Neutrality, Goal Lottery, Generality Debt, and Normalized Exclusion. The abstract's prescription has three parts: prioritize specificity in engineering and societal goals, center pluralism about multiple worthwhile approaches to multiple valuable goals, and foster innovation through greater inclusion of disciplines and communities.

Borhane Blili-Hamelin, an independent researcher and TD data scientist, frames the underlying issue as one of who sets the agenda: 'What disagreements are we not having and what questions about what matters and to whom are we jumping over.' Mitchell's operational version is shorter. 'Get down to the brass tacks. What are the specifics of what this technology should be useful for,' she says.

The piece does not single out individual companies. Two of the experts we follow circulated it after publication.