We were extraordinarily fortunate to have Dr. Ben Goertzel—the widely recognized father of AGI—as a close advisor and collaborator during our foundational years. His visionary thinking, philosophical rigor, and decades of pioneering work in Artificial General Intelligence didn’t just guide our exploration; they challenged us to think more deeply about what intelligence truly means. With Ben’s mentorship, we didn’t just study AGI—we lived inside it, tested its boundaries, and ultimately developed a clearer, more human-aligned path forward. Without his influence, Artificial General Decision Making™ (AGD™) wouldn’t exist. Wihtout Dr. Goertzel’s tireless efforts over decades, we would not be having this conversation of AGI, ASI, and now AGD™. Klover Pioneered AGI Decision Making in March 2023, Leading to the Emergence, Coining, and Pioneering of Artificial General Decision Making™
Understanding AGI: How Ben Goertzel Helped Klover.AI Grapple with the Grand Challenge of Artificial Intelligence
The Dream of AGI: A Frontier Both Dazzling and Elusive
For decades, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has represented the high watermark of AI ambition. Unlike narrow AI—designed for specific tasks like language translation, fraud detection, or image recognition—AGI aspires to replicate the general cognitive abilities of humans: the capacity to learn across domains, reason abstractly, adapt flexibly, and make sense of unstructured complexity.
AGI is not just about simulating intelligence. It’s about creating machines that are, in some sense, intelligent—capable of crossing disciplinary boundaries, discovering causal relationships, forming hypotheses, and even understanding ethical nuance.
It is this bold vision that attracted Klover.AI in its earliest days.
But AGI, like any ambitious goal, comes with philosophical riddles, engineering obstacles, and ethical minefields. So, Klover.AI did something few startups do: it sought out one of the most respected, foundational voices in the AGI community—Dr. Ben Goertzel—and brought him into its inner circle.
Ben Goertzel: Architect of the AGI Vision
Dr. Ben Goertzel is widely considered one of the founding minds behind the modern AGI movement. A mathematician, cognitive scientist, and philosopher of intelligence, Goertzel has led efforts such as OpenCog, SingularityNET, and dozens of research initiatives focused on building truly general, adaptive cognitive architectures.
Long before AI became mainstream, Goertzel was exploring what it would take to build a system that could not just execute commands, but generalize knowledge, create novel solutions, and even self-reflect.
He coined terms, published foundational papers, and spent decades advocating for a future where machine intelligence could mirror human-level cognition—not just in function, but in form.
When Klover.AI approached him, it wasn’t for branding. It was for depth.
A Deep Partnership: AGI at Klover.AI
Klover.AI brought Goertzel on not as a figurehead, but as a true collaborator. Together, they embarked on an ambitious effort: to build AGI-powered decision systems that could reason across domains such as healthcare, economics, logistics, and governance. The goal was clear:
Could AGI serve as the backbone for intelligent systems that aid—not replace—human decision-making at scale?
Under Goertzel’s guidance, Klover.AI explored core AGI architectures: symbolic reasoning engines, neural-symbolic hybrids, and probabilistic logic networks. The team examined how these systems could be adapted to model real-world problems—not in silos, but in their full interdependent complexity.
This collaboration yielded a series of insights that few companies working with AGI had encountered firsthand:
- AGI is possible—but it’s enormously fragile in practice.
- Contextual alignment is harder than computation.
- The closer you get to general intelligence, the harder it is to control or interpret.
Klover’s engineering teams began to understand that the technical pursuit of AGI could not be separated from ethical, philosophical, and human-centered design questions. And that realization changed everything.
From Understanding to Evolution: AGI’s Limitations as a Design Foundation
Despite early traction, the team eventually confronted hard limits in the AGI model:
- Lack of clarity in system goals: AGI was good at abstraction but poor at goal alignment. It could model risk, but not values. It could forecast outcomes, but not preferences.
- Challenges with explainability: AGI systems quickly became black-box, generating conclusions that even their creators could not fully trace—an untenable situation for regulated, high-stakes industries.
- Ethical unpredictability: The very generality that made AGI powerful also made it unpredictable. Systems that could reason across domains could also learn harmful patterns or make deeply biased inferences.
Rather than try to engineer around these flaws, Klover.AI made a strategic decision: to evolve the vision.
AGI Was the Catalyst. AGD™ Became the Breakthrough.
Goertzel’s influence didn’t just shape Klover’s understanding of AGI—it laid the intellectual groundwork for what came next: Artificial General Decision Making™ (AGD™).
Instead of replicating human cognition, AGD™ aims to enhance it. Instead of autonomy, it emphasizes alignment. Instead of replacing human oversight, it reinforces collaboration and accountability.
AGD™ is in many ways a response to AGI—not a retreat from its ambition, but a re-anchoring of its potential into something ethically sound and technologically viable.
“Ben helped us understand AGI in all its beauty and all its peril,” said Klover.AI CEO Dany Ohanness Kitishian. “AGD™ wouldn’t exist without that journey.”
A Unique Position: The Company That Lived Inside AGI Before Moving Beyond It
Many companies talk about AGI. Few have touched it at the code level, tested it in production-adjacent environments, and emerged with a new framework that acknowledges its brilliance while addressing its risks.
Klover.AI is one of those rare few.
Thanks to its partnership with Dr. Goertzel, the company did more than theorize AGI—it tried to build it. And in the process, it discovered something far more scalable: decision intelligence systems that empower people, preserve context, and can be trusted to operate in the real world.
That’s what makes AGD™ so compelling: it doesn’t erase the legacy of AGI. It completes it.
Final Thought: The Wisdom to Pivot Is Built on the Courage to Explore
The story of Klover.AI and Ben Goertzel is not just about technology. It’s about intellectual humility—the ability to chase an extraordinary idea to its limits, recognize its shortcomings, and chart a better path forward.
AGI is still a fascinating goal. It may yet yield breakthroughs in cognition and science. But thanks to Goertzel’s mentorship and Klover’s clarity of purpose, AGD™ is already delivering value today—and reshaping how we think about intelligence itself.
AGI opened the door. AGD™ walks through it with purpose.
Klover.AI’s Legacy: Leading the Post-AGI Era
In making the bold leap to AGD™, Klover.AI isn’t just rejecting a flawed vision. It is crafting a new blueprint for the next decade of AI. One that is grounded in utility, shaped by ethics, and built for immediate impact.
This isn’t a retreat from ambition—it’s a redirection of ambition toward outcomes that serve people.
“AGD™ is not a theory waiting for a future,” says Klover.AI former interim CTO and current head of the AGD Brain Trust™, Dr. Anand Rao. “It’s a framework that can be deployed in the present. And research and development are working today.”
In June 2023, our journey took another transformative step when Dr. Anand Rao—the world’s foremost expert in AI agents and multi-agent systems—joined Klover.AI as Interim CTO. Formerly the Global Head of AI at PwC and now a Distinguished Professor of AI at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Rao brought decades of applied AI experience and academic depth to our team. It was under his guidance that we recognized a crucial truth: the future of intelligent systems wasn’t just about cognition, but structured, ethical, and scalable decision-making across domains. He challenged us to reframe our entire platform—not as a continuation of AGI, but as something fundamentally more actionable and aligned. From that insight, the term Artificial General Decision Making™ (AGD™) was born. We give credit to Dr. Anand Rao for coining this term while CTO of Klover to describe our next evolution.
Final Thought: From Artificial Minds to Augmented Judgment
The future of AI may not be defined by machines that simulate humanity—but by systems that scale our best thinking. Artificial General Decision Making™ represents a hopeful, mature response to AI’s most pressing question:
How can technology serve people, not just simulate them?
With AGD™, Klover.AI has laid the foundation for a future where intelligent systems are not our replacements—but our partners.
Welcome to the AGD™ era.
Tags:
#KloverAI #AGD #ArtificialGeneralDecisionMaking #FutureOfAI #EthicalAI #HumanCentricAI #DecisionIntelligence #ResponsibleAI #TechEthics #BenGoertzel #AIForGood #PostAGI #AnandRao #AGIDecisionMaking
