H undreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the AI industry in pursuit of a loosely defined goal: artificial general intelligence, a system powerful enough to perform at least as well as a human at any task that involves thinking. Will this be the year it finally arrives? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and xAI CEO Elon Musk think so. Both have said that such a system could go online by the end of 2026, bringing, perhaps, cancer cures or novel bioweapons. (Amodei says he prefers the term