The 19th Annual Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-26) started yesterday in San Francisco, California, drawing researchers, engineers, and thinkers from academia, industry, open-source communities, and beyond for a hybrid in-person and virtual gathering.
Organized by the AGI Society, the four-day event (through July 30) marks the longest-running conference series dedicated exclusively to human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI) and beyond. For the rest of the week, AGI-26 will be the center of debate on one of the era’s defining scientific and engineering quests: how to advance from narrow artificial intelligence (AI) systems toward robust, accountable AGI.
The program centers on advancing theoretical foundations of AGI, developing practical pathways from current AI toward AGI, and confronting societal and ethical implications. Sessions will explore neural-symbolic and hybrid methods, predictive coding, practical proto-AGI systems, active inference, and more, alongside paper presentations, workshops, tutorials, and software/hardware demonstrations. An Investor Day on July 30 will examine the broader investment and societal landscape.
Confirmed keynotes and speakers include Ben Goertzel , Karl J. Friston, Alison Gopnik, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Levin, Gary Marcus, Anil Seth, Joscha Bach, and many others spanning neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI engineering.
Remarkable intellectual and practical progress toward AGI
Goertzel captured the moment: “There has never been such an exciting time to be working toward AGI," he said. "The rate of intellectual and practical progress toward AGI we are seeing is truly remarkable, if at times a bit dizzying.”
The conference opened with three parallel workshops, one of which titled “Where are We on the Path to Hyperon-Based AGI?” Hyperon is the AI framework developed by Goertzel's team. Goertzel referenced Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis' description of our times as "the foothills of the Singularity."
The conference is being streamed in realtime on the YouTube channel of SingularityNET. Recordings of past sessions are also available.