Marc Benioff, a guy who has poured money into artificial intelligence investments and claims that AI tools are doing half of the work at Salesforce, isn’t so sure about all the hype around this whole sector all of a sudden. During an appearance on the “20VC” podcast, as spotted by Business Insider, Benioff poured water on the concept of “artificial general intelligence,” calling the obsession around the industry’s white whale “hypnosis.”
During the conversation, podcast host Harry Stebbings—himself a venture capitalist who has lots of money tied up in the success of AI—pointed to a recent interview The Verge conducted with Amazon AGI Labs chief David Luan, in which Luan said there are fewer than 1,000 people in the world who would be “extremely valuable contributors” to building cutting edge AI systems. Benioff scoffed, not just at Luan’s statement but his very title. “AGI head, that sounds like an oxymoron,” the Salesforce CEO said.
Benioff explained that he’s skeptical of the very idea of artificial general intelligence, the theory that AI could one day develop human-like cognitive processing skills for reasoning and learning, rather than just spitting back outputs based on training data. “You’re talking to somebody who is extremely suspect if anybody uses those initials, ‘AGI,’” Benioff said. “I think that we have all been sold a lot of hypnosis around what’s about to happen with AI.”
He didn’t rule out the possibility of eventually achieving AGI, but stated, “I just realize that isn’t the state of technology today,” and noted that no AI that people have interacted with comes close to that theoretical bar. “It’s not a person, and it’s not intelligent, and it’s not conscious,” he said.
Benioff is right to sour on the idea of AGI, a concept that has only been muddied by the ongoing insistence by AI firms that it’s right around the corner. Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, recently conceded that his company’s latest model, GPT-5, is not AGI because it doesn’t “continuously learn.” Altman called the model “generally intelligent” but not AGI. Of course, the only official definition that OpenAI has for AGI isn’t a technical one but a monetary one. Microsoft and OpenAI agreed to define AGI as a system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.
Of course, Benioff isn’t above AI hype, either. In addition to claiming that one of his companies has farmed out half of all work to AI, he also used the pages of Time Magazine—a publication he owns—to claim AI would result in “a revolution that will fundamentally redefine how humans work, live, and connect with one another.” Now, you won’t believe this, but Salesforce happens to sell AI agents. So Benioff certainly still believes in the AI hype for his own company’s products. It’s just everyone else who is overpromising.
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