Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters claims current AI systems already constitute artificial general intelligence. Speaking at ETHDenver, he argued that while AI behaves differently than human intelligence, it is “very general” and marks an inflection point. Walters also raised security concerns about autonomous AI agents, warning they inevitably make mistakes despite safeguards.
Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters stated that artificial general intelligence may have already arrived. He told Decrypt that current leading models already meet his definition of AGI.
“I think that we’re at the inflection point where we have AGI,” he said. “I completely believe that this is general intelligence. It’s nothing like us. It learns in a completely different way, but it is intelligent nonetheless, and it is very general.” Walters, whose company created the open-source ElizaOS framework for blockchain AI agents, rejected the idea of a single dominant AI system emerging. He stated, “I just do not see it as the AI God. There’s never going to be one, because life loves variants.”
He warned that autonomous agents powered by this intelligence introduce serious security risks, including prompt injection and wallet compromises. Walters argued that as AI advances, it behaves less predictably, making foolproof security impossible. “At the end of the day, you’re dealing with something that’s more like a human and less like a calculator,” he said. “It’s gonna do stupid things sometimes, and there’s just no way to build a super secure system that’s going to keep them from doing something dumb.”
Walters also commented on the state of decentralized AI, arguing that fully decentralized AI does not yet exist and that local execution comes closest. His work on AI agents began during the GPT-3 era, with progress accelerating with the launch of GPT-4, which enabled more reliable structured responses for action calling.
