Waiting for Godot

In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two men wait by a tree for someone they wouldn’t recognize, on a day nobody wrote down. This episode sets the play beside the AI industry’s wait for AGI: the definitions that don’t agree, the dates that keep moving, the researchers who think the whole field is waiting in the wrong place, and the leaves already growing on the tree.

Sources mentioned:

• OpenAI Charter — the “most economically valuable work” definition of AGI
• Microsoft and OpenAI’s financial definition of AGI, TechCrunch, and the 2025 expert-panel agreement
• Yann LeCun and Demis Hassabis on “general intelligence”, The Decoder
• Andrej Karpathy: “AGI is still a decade away”, via Simon Willison
• Nathan Lambert, “Where I stand on RSI”, Interconnects
• Ilya Sutskever on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast and Richard Sutton on the same show
• AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel report — the scaling survey of 475 researchers
• Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, “AI as Normal Technology”
• Companies are laying off workers because of AI’s potential, not its performance, Harvard Business Review
• Stanford Digital Economy Lab, “Canaries in the Coal Mine” — early-career employment in AI-exposed jobs

Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated by an AI voice. A Mandalivia production.