Leogao

My Hobby – Running Deranged Surveys By Leogau Published on March 26, 2026 In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in.

It's well known that the Bay Area is a bubble and that normal people don't spend that much time thinking about things like AGI.

But there was still some disagreement on just how strong that bubble is.

I made a spicy claim.

Even at NeurIPS, the biggest gathering of AI researchers in the world, half the people wouldn't know what AGI is.

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As good Bayesians, we agreed to settle the matter empirically.

I would go to NeurIPS, walk around the conference hall and stop random people to ask them what AGI stands for.

Surprisingly, most of the people I approached agreed to answer my question.

I ended up asking 38 people and only 63% of them could tell me what AGI stands for.

Some of the people who answered correctly were a little perplexed why I was even asking such a basic question, and if it was a trick question.

The people who didn't know were equally confused.

Many simply furrowed their brows in confusion.

Some made a valiant attempt.

I heard a few artificial generative intelligences and even an Amazon general intelligence.

Judging from the response I got on X, the everything app, this was a very surprising outcome.

I ended up running this experiment again at NeurIPS 2025 with an even bigger sample size, n equals 115.

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After this first experience with surveying people, it became clear to me that the next step was to venture further outside the bubble and survey the general US population.