Michael I. Jordan says the term AGI functions mainly as a public relations label that confuses early-career researchers and polarizes machine learning discourse between alarmist and exuberant positions

Michael I. Jordan on the new MLST. Four things: > AGI is a PR term. It confuses young people. > Discourse is bipolar, either alarmist or exuberant, this is in his words "so demoralizing" for 20- and 25-year-old researchers. > ML's methods came from statistics and operations research, NOT the AI tradition. > Data markets are Stackelberg games, not optimisation problems. A lot of ML researchers have never computed an equilibrium. Michael I. Jordan is a no-nonsense original gangster of the field and was described by Science magazine, back in 2016 as the most influential living computer scientist.