Hype is growing from leaders of major AI companies that “strong” computer intelligence will imminently outstrip humans, but many researchers in the field see the claims as marketing spin.

The belief that human-or-better intelligence — often called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) — will emerge from current machine-learning techniques fuels hypotheses for the future ranging from machine-delivered hyperabundance to human extinction.

“Systems that start to point to AGI are coming into view,” OpenAI chief Sam Altman wrote in a blog post last month. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said the milestone “could come as early as 2026”.

Such predictions help justify the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into computing hardware and the energy supplies to run it.

Others, though are more sceptical.

Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun told AFP last month that “we are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling up LLMs” — the large language models behind current systems like ChatGPT or Claude.

LeCun’s view appears backed by a majority of academics in the field.

Over three-quarters of respondents to a recent survey by the US-based Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) agreed that “scaling up current approaches” was unlikely to produce AGI.

‘Genie out of the bottle’

Some academics believe that many of the companies’ claims, which bosses have at times flanked with warnings about AGI’s dangers for mankind, are a strategy to capture attention.

Businesses have “made these big investments, and they have to pay off,” said Kristian Kersting, a leading researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and AAAI fellow singled out for his achievements in the field.

“They just say, ‘this is so dangerous that only I can operate it, in fact I myself am afraid but we’ve already let the genie out of the bottle, so I’m going to sacrifice myself on your behalf — but then you’re dependent on me’.”

Scepticism among academic researchers is not total, with prominent figures like Nobel-winning physicist Geoffrey Hinton or 2018 Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio warning about dangers from powerful AI.

“It’s a bit like Goethe’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, you have something you suddenly can’t control any more,” Kersting said — referring to a poem in which a would-be sorcerer loses control of a broom he has enchanted to do his chores.

A similar, more recent thought experiment is the “paperclip maximiser”.

This imagined AI would pursue its goal of making paperclips so single-mindedly that it would turn Earth and ultimately all matter in the universe into paperclips or paperclip-making machines — having first got rid of human beings that it judged might hinder its progress by switching it off.

While not “evil” as such, the maximiser would fall fatally short on what thinkers in the field call “alignment” of AI with human objectives and values.

Kersting said he “can understand” such fears — while suggesting that “human intelligence, its diversity and quality is so outstanding that it will take a long time, if ever” for computers to match it.

He is far more concerned with near-term harms from already-existing AI, such as discrimination in cases where it interacts with humans.

‘Biggest thing ever’

The apparently stark gulf in outlook between academics and AI industry leaders may simply reflect people’s attitudes as they pick a career path, suggested Sean O hEigeartaigh, director of the AI: Futures and Responsibility programme at Britain’s Cambridge University.

“If you are very optimistic about how powerful the present techniques are, you’re probably more likely to go and work at one of the companies that’s putting a lot of resource into trying to make it happen,” he said.

Even if Altman and Amodei may be “quite optimistic” about rapid timescales and AGI emerges much later, “we should be thinking about this and taking it seriously, because it would be the biggest thing that would ever happen,” O hEigeartaigh added.

“If it were anything else… a chance that aliens would arrive by 2030 or that there’d be another giant pandemic or something, we’d put some time into planning for it”.

The challenge can lie in communicating these ideas to politicians and the public.

Talk of super-AI “does instantly create this sort of immune reaction… it sounds like science fiction,” O hEigeartaigh said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Dollar Tree really has a discount for everyone. A group of private equity investors agreed to buy the flailing Family Dollar chain for $1 billion, a sharp loss for the Dollar Tree, which acquired it ten years ago for roughly $9 billion.

Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management will take over the nearly 7,000 Family Dollar stores. That’ll halve the number of stores Dollar Tree operates under its umbrella.

Why couldn’t Dollar Tree make Family Dollar work?

When Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar in 2015, it outbid rival Dollar General in hopes of cementing its status as the king of budget retailers. But Dollar Tree quickly learned that it had snapped up poorly maintained stores and found that Family Dollar had a different customer base that proved to be challenging to serve.

• Family Dollar serves lower-income shoppers and sells a range of household items at varied, but still cheap, price points. Dollar Tree’s customer base tends to have higher incomes and tends to use the store for craft and party supplies that predominantly cost around $1.
• But when Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores were near each other, they were just similar enough to cannibalize each other’s foot traffic. The business also faced stiff competition from retailers like Amazon and Walmart.

The icing on the small, heavily discounted cake was the Justice Department slapping Family Dollar with a record $41.6 million fine for selling items that were stored in a West Memphis warehouse that was littered with not just live rats, but dead and decaying ones as well.

After it drops the Family Dollar baggage…Dollar Tree said yesterday it’s gaining market share among its higher income customers and may aim to offset President Trump’s tariffs by raising prices at some locations. In 2021, the chain increased prices to $1.25 saying it would allow stores to offer a wider range of products.—MM

This report was written by Matty Merritt and was originally published by Morning Brew.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

About an hour outside of Boston, Amazon is building the future of its warehouse business. Here, in a 350,000-square-foot facility, the shipping behemoth has headquartered its robotics hub, where the company designs, tests, and manufactures cutting-edge machines that will operate side by side with workers in its fulfillment centers—and, in time, replace many of them. 

Amazon is not known for its robotics prowess, but the e-commerce giant has quietly invested billions of dollars in the field for more than a decade, beginning with its acquisition of warehouse automation startup Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012. Robotics is now central to Amazon’s efficiency and safety goals as the company seeks to produce autonomous, mobile machines that can pick up and sort packages.

I had the opportunity to visit the Massachusetts hub earlier in March—the new center opened in 2023 as an offshoot of the original Kiva facilities, which are about 50 miles away and still operational. Amazon handles the entire design and manufacturing process in-house, with programmers, hardware engineers, and testers all working under one roof to produce robots that will soon operate across Amazon’s global fulfillment network. 

Joseph Quinlivan, Amazon’s vice president of global robotics, has been with the company for its entire robotics journey, starting at Kiva and joining Amazon after the acquisition. “The great thing about Amazon is that it operates in many ways like a startup and has a startup mentality of speed,” he told me. “You don’t get bogged down with bureaucracy.”

He gave me a tour of Amazon’s innovative approach to robotic design, which includes brainstorming rooms for software engineers that are cluttered with whiteboards and overlook the sprawling factory floors. Quinlivan showed me his personal favorite: a robot called Proteus, which resembles an oversized Roomba, transports bins carrying packages, and can operate independently and side by side with employees.   

The future of work

Robots like Proteus are designed to replace repetitive motions by warehouse workers. Injuries are a major concern for the $2 trillion company, especially after a Senate investigation last year led by progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders put a spotlight on safety failures at Amazon’s fulfillment centers. The investigation found that injuries are nearly twice as high as the industry average. Amazon rejected the investigation’s findings, describing it as “an attempt to collect information and twist it to support a false narrative.”  

Still, Quinlivan acknowledged that Amazon’s push into robotics is focused on the “most challenging tasks” carried out by workers, such as lifting and moving items. “[Safety] is front and center,” Quinlivan said, arguing that the newer generation of machines will be able to automate rote tasks 10-fold more than the previous one. “That’s where we start.” 

Automation, of course, also conjures fears of replacement. Amazon says that it has invested more than $1 billion in upskilling, or training employees for different roles. “It’s creating new, exciting jobs and opportunities for potentially a group of people that wouldn’t have that opportunity,” Quinlivan said. 

Robotics is integral to Amazon’s plans to get packages from your shopping cart to your door with increasing speed. But as the company fends off accusations of worker safety issues and job loss, its rapidly evolving slate of machines is also a symbol of the company’s relentless pursuit of productivity.  

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com