AGIRI -- the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute -- is a small team of individuals committed to bucking the trend toward AI conservatism, and explicitly working toward the grand goal of true artificial general intelligence. We realize that AGI is a huge and speculative quest, in which success is far from guaranteed. But, in the words of Sir Edmund Hilary (the first to ascend Everest), "Never venture, never win." The potential payoff is, after all, spectacular. As many futurist thinkers have observed, true AI may be the last big innovation humans ever make. Because if one can create a software program with a roughly human level of general intelligence, this program will most likely be able to learn to program and do AI theory -- and thus to improve its own intelligence. The creation of a real AGI thus has the potential to lead to a process of exponentially increasing computational intelligence, resulting in software whose intelligence and general capability vastly exceeds that of human beings. The existence of such software could lead to radical transformation of the human race itself, and to further developments we humans (with our small brains) literally can't even dream of.

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