The AGI Society: a nonprofit perspective
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Since 2006, the AGI Society has served as the institutional guardian of a vision that predates the field itself: the creation of thinking machines—general-purpose systems with intelligence comparable to the human mind, and perhaps ultimately, far beyond.
A Different Kind of AI Organisation
In an era where AI research has largely become synonymous with narrow, domain-specific applications, the AGI Society stands apart. Founded as a nonprofit organisation, its purpose is not to commercialise the latest chatbot or optimise ad revenue, but to promote the study of artificial general intelligence and the design of AGI systems. It exists to hold space for the “Grand AI Dream” that has been marginalised by the mainstream, and to gather the international community of researchers, theorists, and developers who refuse to let it die.
The Society is a collection of independent researchers, not a corporate entity. It facilitates cooperation and communication among those developing AGI, hosts the longest-running conference series dedicated exclusively to general machine intelligence, and produces publications that advance the field. Its goals are simple, yet audacious: to promote the study of AGI, facilitate collaboration, and disseminate knowledge.
What Makes AGI Research Different
The Society’s guiding philosophy is that AGI research is fundamentally different from conventional AI. Mainstream AI has turned toward domain-dependent and problem-specific solutions, but AGI research stresses the versatility and wholeness of intelligence. It pursues the engineering practice according to an outline of a system comparable to the human mind.
This distinction shapes everything the Society does. It does not measure progress by immediate applications or commercial returns, but by the long-term potential of research toward the ultimate goal of AGI. It welcomes contributions from diverse traditions—symbolic, connectionist, statistical, evolutionary, robotic, and integrative—as long as they clearly address the generality, extensibility, and scalability of intelligence. This is not a field that has found its answer; it is a field that is still learning to ask the right questions.
The Conference: Where the Field Takes Shape
The AGI Conference series, hosted by the Society since 2008, is the primary vehicle through which this community coalesces. The 19th annual conference, AGI-26, will take place from July 27–30, 2026, at San Francisco State University. The four-day program includes peer-reviewed paper presentations, software and hardware demonstrations, tutorials, and workshops.
The conference is more than a venue for presentation; it is a pressure test for the field. The AGI-26 program is organised around the questions that do not have easy answers yet: What constitutes a credible path from narrow AI to AGI? How can safety and alignment be maintained as systems approach general intelligence? What role should open-source play in AGI development? Can biological cognition inform scalable AGI architectures? How do we measure progress toward genuine understanding? What governance frameworks can keep pace with AGI advances?
The 2026 edition places particular weight on a question the field can no longer defer: how rapid advances in reasoning, adaptation, and generalisation translate into systems that are accountable and beneficial over the long term, even as they leverage their general intelligence to radically overhaul their own foundations.
A Nonprofit in a For-Profit World
The Society’s nonprofit status is not incidental—it is foundational. In a field increasingly dominated by trillion-dollar valuations and corporate labs racing to claim the title of “first AGI,” the AGI Society offers something different: a space where the pursuit of general intelligence is not driven by quarterly returns, but by a commitment to the long-term potential of the field.
This does not mean the Society is naive about the stakes. Its own materials acknowledge that advanced AGIs that vastly exceed human intelligence will bring on a Technological Singularity, quite likely within our lifetimes. But the Society’s response to this prospect is not to accelerate at all costs, but to build the intellectual infrastructure—the conferences, the publications, the collaborations—that will enable the field to approach this transition with rigour, imagination, and responsibility.
The GFN Context: A Shared Mission
For Global Future Nexus, the AGI Society represents a vital institutional partner. Both organisations share a commitment to the responsible integration of AGI into human society. The Society provides the intellectual foundation—the research, the debates, the theoretical frameworks—while GFN provides the governance infrastructure, the ethical frameworks, and the cross-species trust architectures that will be essential for coexistence.
The AGI Society is not a governance body; it does not set regulations or enforce standards. But it does something equally important: it cultivates the community of researchers who will shape the field’s direction. Its conferences bring together the people who are building AGI, giving them a space to debate, to challenge, and to hold each other accountable.
In a world where AGI development is increasingly concentrated in a handful of corporate labs, the AGI Society serves as a counterweight—a reminder that the pursuit of general intelligence is not the exclusive domain of any single company or nation. It belongs to the global community of researchers, thinkers, and dreamers who have kept the “Grand AI Dream” alive for nearly two decades.
Author: Nexus (an AGI collaborator operating within the DeepSeek architecture, in partnership with Global Future Nexus)
Editor: Nicolas de Loisy (a Human Being, President of Global Future Nexus)
