# The Cost of the AGI Delusion  ## Metadata - Author: Michael C. Horowitz, Lauren A. Kahn - Full Title: The Cost of the AGI Delusion - Category: #articles - Document Tags: #ai #autonomous-weapons #technology - Summary: Many experts say superintelligent AI, or AGI, is still far away and uncertain. The U.S. should focus on quickly using and adopting current AI tools to stay competitive, especially against China. Investing in AI training, research, and practical applications is key to leading in AI technology. - URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/cost-agi-delusion ## Highlights - The United States should therefore treat the AI race with China like a marathon, not a sprint. This is especially important given the centrality of AI to Washington’s competition with Beijing. Today, both the country’s new tech firms, like DeepSeek, and existing powerhouses, like Huawei, are increasingly keeping pace with their American counterparts. By emphasizing steady advancements and economic integration, China may now even be ahead of the United States in terms of adopting and using robotics. To win the AI race, Washington thus needs to emphasize practical investments in the development and rapid adoption of AI. It cannot distort U.S. policy by dashing for something that might not exist. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k642ch1kr0ejf41fsd0586r1)) - To avoid falling behind in [AI adoption](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/china-real-artificial-intelligence-race-innovation) within the bureaucracy, the United States should launch a large-scale AI literacy initiative across the government. Public employees of all kinds need to know how to use both general AI systems and ones tailored to their jobs. American officials should offer expanded access to AI training both for their particular roles and for general use, including training on issues like automation bias (in which people overestimate the accuracy of AI systems). To do so, Washington can take advantage of the fact that major American companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are willing to give public employees and agencies more exposure and access to their technologies, allowing the state, at least for now, to use their large language models virtually for free. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k642hheakwtv5p3a1ftg2dg4)) - Done right, AI could revolutionize the government’s efficiency. Even if it helps only in mundane areas, such as energy load optimization, cybersecurity and IT, predictive maintenance, logistics, supply chain management, and acquisition paperwork, it will allow larger bureaucracies to overcome or eliminate regulatory hurdles. That could, in turn, fuel more private-sector adoption. Right now, private sector pilot projects with frontier AI sometimes fail to successfully transition from prototype to full capability, often because of integration challenges or misalignment between a proposed AI solution and the problem it targets. By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail to deliver results. Industry surveys report that 88 percent of pilots never reach production. The IT company Gartner projects that 40 percent of “agentic AI” deployments—autonomous AI systems capable of planning and executing multi-step tasks with minimal or no human oversight—will be scrapped by 2027. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k642jgbkyfkykvhap2nky3zy))