Catenaa, Thursday, February 26, 2026- Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters said artificial general intelligence has already arrived, arguing that current leading AI models meet his definition of AGI.
He spoke last week during ETHDenver, citing rapid advances in large language models and autonomous agents.
Walters said modern systems demonstrate broad intelligence across tasks, even if they learn differently from humans.
He rejected the view that AGI will emerge as a single dominant system, saying intelligence will evolve in varied forms rather than as one central authority.
The term artificial general intelligence was first introduced in the late 1990s and later promoted by researchers including Ben Goertzel.
It refers to AI capable of matching or exceeding human cognitive ability across a wide range of tasks. Leaders such as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have warned that AGI could emerge within years.
Walters founded Eliza Labs in 2024 and developed ElizaOS, an open source framework for autonomous blockchain agents. He said progress accelerated after the release of OpenAI GPT-4 in 2023, which improved structured outputs and enabled more reliable agent actions.
As AI agents expand into crypto and consumer platforms, Walters warned of mounting security risks.
He cited prompt injection attacks and wallet compromises as growing threats as agents gain deeper system access.
He also said fully decentralized AI does not yet exist, though local execution models come closest. As systems grow more autonomous, he argued, they resemble fallible human actors rather than predictable software.
