Ben Goertzel is an American AI researcher and entrepreneur best known for helping to popularize the phrase “artificial general intelligence” and for organizing a research community around it. While the exact phrase appears earlier (physicist Mark Gubrud used it in 1997), Goertzel and a small circle of colleagues adopted it in the early 2000s to mark a distinction from the narrow, task-specific systems that dominated the field. The label was meant to name the original goal of AI - building a machine with broad, human-like general intelligence - as a research program in its own right.
The landmark that fixed the term was the 2007 edited volume “Artificial General Intelligence,” published by Springer and co-edited by Goertzel and Cassio Pennachin. The book gathered contributions from researchers working on integrative, general-purpose systems rather than single applications, and it is widely treated as the formal launch of AGI as a named subfield. Goertzel went on to found the annual AGI conference series, which has run since 2008.
Goertzel’s own technical work centers on cognitive architectures - notably OpenCog, an open-source framework that combines symbolic knowledge representation, probabilistic reasoning, and learning in pursuit of general intelligence. He later founded SingularityNET, a decentralized AI platform, and is widely associated in the press with Sophia, the humanoid robot built by Hanson Robotics. His positions are openly futurist and at the optimistic end of the spectrum on AGI timelines, which places him in long-running debate with more cautious or skeptical voices in the field.