Van der Maaten’s Three-System Roadmap to AGI Is Brilliantly Pragmatic

Laurens Van der Maaten's framework for the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), presented at CVPR 2025, proposes a shift from viewing AGI as a singular superintelligent entity to seeing it as a collaborative network of specialized AI and human agents, emphasizing the social and cooperative nature of true intelligence. His three-system roadmap highlights the current saturation of reactive "thinking fast" capabilities in AI, the potential for breakthroughs in deliberate "thinking slow" reasoning models, and the transformative possibilities of "thinking together" through multi-agent collaboration networks. Van der Maaten identifies the challenges of scaling and integration in creating these systems, suggesting that future developments will require innovations in multi-agent reinforcement learning and mechanism design. His pragmatic approach offers a structured, achievable path to AGI by focusing on the interplay of social intelligence and collaboration, providing a clear direction for researchers and moving AGI discussions beyond speculative narratives.