AI without the hype

China's latest large language model Kimi K3 is believed by many to be among the most powerful LLMs in the world, yet developed at a fraction of the cost and compute of its American counterparts. The conversation in Al is increasingly turning to something bigger: AGI, artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical Al that can match or exceed human cognitive abilities across virtually any task. Professor Song-chun Zhu, founding director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, has spent three decades researching Al. He firmly rejects the idea that building ever bigger, more powerful language models is the road to AGI. Instead, his team is taking a fundamentally different approach, a cognitive architecture embodied by a virtual child called Tongtong who learns continuously through interactions with the world.