The whole plot of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot fits in a sentence: two men stand by a tree on a country road, waiting for someone called Godot.
They aren’t sure when he’s due. “He said Saturday,” one man called Vladimir offers, and then, after a pause, “I think.” The other man, Estragon, isn’t convinced it is Saturday. It could be Sunday, or Monday, or Friday. Every so often one of them gets restless:
“Let’s go.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We’re waiting for Godot.”
At the end of the day a boy arrives with a message. Mr. Godot won’t come this evening, but surely tomorrow. The next evening the two men are back at the tree, the boy is back with the same message, and he insists he has never been there before.
Godot never comes. Very little happens at all. The one thing that changes is the tree. On the first night it is bare. On the second it has four or five leaves.
I’ve been thinking about that tree, because AI has one too, with a large crowd standing around it waiting for AGI.
Who is Godot?
The strangest thing about the man they’re waiting for is that they don’t know him. When a stranger comes down the road, Estragon leans over and asks whether that’s him. It isn’t. Later he admits he wouldn’t recognize Godot if he saw him. And when Vladimir finally asks the boy what Mr. Godot does with his days, the answer is “He does nothing, Sir.”
AGI has a similar problem. OpenAI’s charter describes it as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” When OpenAI and Microsoft needed a version they could put in a contract, they reportedly settled on a system that can earn $100 billion in profits. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sets the bar at an AI that can build a billion-dollar company, and this month he declared on X that OpenAI’s newest model was AGI.
Since the definitions don’t agree, Microsoft and OpenAI agreed in 2025 that any claim of AGI would be confirmed by an independent panel of experts, so that someone would be able to recognize him when he arrives. Sam Altman, whose company was founded to build him, has said AGI is “not a super useful term.”
Other definitions reach for a person. Elon Musk has defined AGI as AI “smarter than the smartest human,” which raises the question of who that is. Einstein is the usual answer, and in 1912, when he needed the geometry for general relativity, he went to his old classmate Marcel Grossmann: “Grossmann, you have to help me, or else I’ll go crazy!”
Yann LeCun, then Meta’s chief AI scientist, took the point further last December. “There is no such thing as general intelligence,” he said. “We think of ourselves as being general, but it’s simply an illusion.” Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, replied on X that LeCun was “just plain incorrect.” A few hours later LeCun wrote back: “I think the disagreement is largely one of vocabulary.”
Wittgenstein thought philosophical problems arise “when language goes on holiday.” Here were two of the most accomplished people in the field, arguing in public about what a word means.
He said Saturday. I think.
Not knowing who Godot is doesn’t stop Vladimir and Estragon from arguing about when he’ll come. The boy doesn’t settle it. Each evening he brings the same message, and each time he says he has never been there before.
The argument about AGI has the same shape. Last October Andrej Karpathy went on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast and said AGI was “still a decade away.” Musk said in April 2024 that it would come “probably next year, within two years.” The deadline passed quietly, and this January, at Davos, he brought the message again: “by the end of this year, or no later than next year.”
And last week Nathan Lambert, who writes a closely followed newsletter on how these models get built, laid out where he stands by quoting the researcher Richard Ngo: “we won’t have superintelligence within the next 8 years, but things will still be moving so fast that it’ll feel like the people who argued for short timelines were right.” Godot won’t come, in other words, but it will feel as if he did.
Everyone seems to have a date. Nobody has the same description.
You’re sure it was here?
Early in the play Estragon has a different worry.
“You’re sure it was here?”
“What?”
“That we were to wait.”
“He said by the tree.”
Some of the most respected people in AI share the worry about the road the industry is on. Ilya Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI, said last November that “the age of scaling” is over and that today’s models “generalize dramatically worse than people.” Richard Sutton, who won the Turing Award for his work on reinforcement learning, calls large language models a dead end, and Gary Marcus has argued for years that they are “not the royal road” to AGI. In a 2025 survey by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 76 percent of 475 researchers said scaling up today’s approaches was unlikely to get there.
None of them has left the tree. With this much money gathered around it, nobody says stop waiting. They say they know a better place to wait. Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024 to start Safe Superintelligence, which was valued at $32 billion within a year. LeCun left Meta last November, and in March his new company, AMI Labs, raised $1.03 billion to build a different kind of model. Nvidia, whose chief executive says Godot is already here, invested in both, including $5 billion in Sutskever’s company this July. Ask Sutskever when, and he still has an answer: a system that learns as well as a person in “like 5 to 20” years.
A few go further. Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor at Princeton argue that AI is a “normal technology,” powerful in the way electricity and the internet were powerful, rather than a new kind of mind. “We do not think there is a useful sense of the term ‘intelligence’ in which AI is more intelligent than people acting with the help of AI,” they write. In their telling, there may be no Godot at all, only the tree.
Four or five leaves
When the curtain goes up on the second act, the tree that was bare the night before has four or five leaves. Vladimir notices, and then the two of them go back to waiting.
Whether or not Godot comes down this road, the leaves are real. The four largest American tech companies are on track to spend close to seven hundred billion dollars on AI infrastructure this year, up from about four hundred billion the year before, and the models coming out of it now work through tasks that take a person hours. Whatever the labs are doing, it isn’t standing still.
The ones standing still might be the rest of us. In a Harvard Business Review survey of about a thousand executives late last year, six in ten said they had cut staff in anticipation of what AI would be able to do, while only two percent had made large cuts because AI had actually shown it could do the work. Most of them were acting on the name, not the leaves.
The people just starting out feel it first. Researchers at Stanford found that employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in the jobs most exposed to AI is now 19 percent below where it would have been had it kept pace with their peers. Enrollment in computer science, long the safe bet on campus, fell more than 8 percent this spring.
They do not move
The play ends the way its first act did. The boy has come and gone, Godot is still on his way, and the two men agree, at last, to leave.
“Well? Shall we go?”
“Yes, let’s go.”
They do not move.
We’re standing at the same tree, arguing about a Saturday nobody wrote down, for someone we wouldn’t recognize, at a spot some of us suspect is the wrong one. The labs will keep building either way, and the leaves will keep coming whatever we decide to call them.
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