Something strange is happening at the edges of both Silicon Valley and the humanities: the most consequential debates are not about the things themselves, but about what we are allowed to call them. Alexandre LeBrun of AMI Labs, the Yann LeCun-backed world model startup, refuses to use the word 'AGI' or 'superintelligence.' Over at The New Yorker, critics are asking who owns the Odyssey after Christopher Nolan's adaptation triggered accusations of 'woke-ifying' Homer. Both controversies are structurally identical: a powerful new thing arrives, and the battle immediately shifts to the label.
Labeling as Control in AI and Classical Culture
LeBrun's reluctance is not false modesty. It is a deliberate deflation of hype that functions as a kind of epistemological hygiene. The word 'superintelligence' carries eschatological weight, borrowed from Nick Bostrom's philosophical tradition, and attaching it to a product shapes regulatory, financial, and cultural expectations before a line of code ships. Meanwhile, the Odyssey discourse reveals the same mechanism in reverse: conservatives want to preserve a label ('Homer's epic, unchanged') as a bulwark against reinterpretation. Finding new resonance in ancient texts is, as the New Yorker critics argue, precisely what translation is. A 2026 paper in arXiv CS.CY by Zexun Wang on 'frontier-provider sovereignty' makes the governance parallel explicit: whoever controls the naming and framing of AI systems effectively controls the governance regime around them.
The Myth-Making Machine Underneath Both Stories
What LeBrun and Nolan's critics share is an awareness that myths scale. 'AGI' is a myth that raises valuations, attracts policy intervention, and spooks labor markets. 'Homer's Odyssey' is a myth that has survived three millennia precisely because it absorbs new readings. The Draken Harald Harfagre Viking ship appearing in Nolan's film is a perfect material symbol: a real historical artifact pressed into cinematic myth-making, its authenticity lending the fiction authority. Stanford's Fred Turner has written about how Silicon Valley borrowed the myth of the countercultural network to sell surveillance capitalism. The same grammar applies here. The Culture Slop conversation with Fred Turner and Jasmine Sun frames AGI rhetoric as 'warmed-over nineties network-society mythology,' which makes LeBrun's refusal to invoke the word look less like humility and more like a calculated exit from a very old story.