Schmidhuber Rejects "AGI Is Here": No Physical-World Mastery, No AGI
On September 8, deep learning veteran Jürgen Schmidhuber publicly dismissed claims that "AGI is here" — including investor Chamath's remark that "AGI has arrived and the next 18 months will be crazy" and similar statements by Jensen Huang — calling them absurd. His core criteria: no AGI without mastery of the physical world, and no genuine self-improvement without self-improving hardware. His verdict: AGI has not arrived.
Confirmed
- He argues that today's genuinely useful AI exists only in the virtual world behind screens (summaries, images, programs, slides); no AI robot can do a plumber's job, or even match a capuchin monkey.
- In an interview he reiterated that LLMs like ChatGPT are far from AGI — essentially a clever way of indexing existing human knowledge in natural language, capable of desk work such as summarizing and illustrating, and thus able to replace many desk jobs, but nothing more.
- On self-improvement: current self-improvement is limited to software-level meta-learning; genuine self-improvement requires self-improving hardware.
- Citing Section 20 of his long survey DLH, he notes that humans have imagined physical self-reproducing machines (SRMs) for centuries — from Descartes to von Neumann to Zuse — without knowing how to build one; AI must control the physical world through physically self-reproducing robots, and an AI that builds robots may be the first practically realizable SRM — his answer to what is still missing for true AGI.
Why it matters
- The dispute goes to the definition of AGI: whether "screen intelligence" suffices or embodiment in the physical world is required. Schmidhuber offers operational technical criteria (physically self-reproducing robots, self-improving hardware) as a stricter standard for assessing AGI timelines.
- He acknowledges LLMs' capacity to replace desk jobs, meaning the economic impact is real even if, by his strict standard, AGI has not yet arrived.
2026-09-07 ~ 2026-09-09 · 8 related posts
- Episode 1: Investor Claims AGI Has Already Arrived(2026-09-07, 2 posts)
- Episode 2: Schmidhuber Rejects "AGI Is Here": No Physical-World Mastery, No AGI(2026-09-07, 8 posts)
Primary sources
- Schmidhuber slams Chamath's 'AGI has arrived': no AGI without mastering the physical world — SchmidhuberAI ·
- Schmidhuber: No AGI without self-replicating AI robots mastering the physical world — SchmidhuberAI ·
- Schmidhuber: AI-controlled general robots could achieve physical self-replication — SchmidhuberAI ·
- Schmidhuber: LLMs are far from AGI — the physical world is far harder — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-07
- [source] Schmidhuber slams Chamath's 'AGI has arrived': no AGI without mastering the physical world — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-08
- [source] Schmidhuber: No AGI without self-replicating AI robots mastering the physical world — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-08
- Schmidhuber: no AGI without real-world mastery and self-improving hardware — Mindrust · 2026-09-08
- [source] Schmidhuber: AI-controlled general robots could achieve physical self-replication — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-08
3 near-duplicate retellings: SchmidhuberAI · SchmidhuberAI · SchmidhuberAI