AGI: Pascal’s Wager Comes To The Rescue Of Executives

In recent months, AI has been making headlines again, even as large organizations invest more than ever to deploy agents. Last summer’s worry—will AI really have an impact? has given way to a more existential fear: does AI have too much impact? The restrictions impo

The restrictions imposed by U.S. authorities at the launch of Mythos 5, Fable 5, and ChatGPT-5.6 served as a wake-up call, reinforced by OpenAI’s announcements in July about a cyberattack caused by a model in testing that escaped its “training cage.” The question of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is back on the table, along with its corollaries—the end of work? Of freedom? Of humanity? complicating the job of executives who are being told to rally their organizations around an AI transformation plan.

But what are we actually talking about? AGI refers to artificial intelligence capable of performing every productive mental task at least as well as the (best) humans. In short, “a country of geniuses in a data center,” in the words of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. While some voices have claimed that this ambition is already all but a reality, most researchers (76% in a 2025 survey conducted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) believe further scientific breakthroughs will be needed to get there.

And where do humans fit into all this? They’re holding up well. AI researchers speak of the “jaggedness” of current AI capabilities—far better than humans at some skills, far worse at others. Even in software development, where the frontier has shifted considerably in AI’s favor, humans and their judgment remain critical for architecture decisions, trade-offs on features, and the allocation of responsibilities.