A Global Economic Alliance research event series
Version 1.0 — April 2026
This Speaker Guide is the general governing document for the "This Is AGI. Prove Us Wrong." event series and the associated City AGI Report and Annual AGI Report publications. It applies to all cities in the event series. Event-specific logistics — date, venue, time, local contacts, and event-specific materials — are provided separately in each city's coordinator materials.
Pro-ticket holders are additionally bound by the Pro-Ticket Submission Agreement agreed to at time of purchase. In any conflict between this Speaker Guide and the Pro-Ticket Submission Agreement, the Submission Agreement governs with respect to pro-ticket submissions.
AGI will transform civilization. Not incrementally, the way previous technologies have — fundamentally. Work, governance, law, economics, and the relationship between humans and the systems we build will all be reshaped. A transformation of that magnitude cannot be navigated by hype cycles or marketing narratives. It requires the tool humanity has developed over millennia for exactly this purpose: the scientific method.
Today, the public conversation about AGI is dominated by commercial actors making claims about intelligence without a scientific theory of what intelligence is. Benchmark scores are treated as evidence of understanding. Scaling trends are treated as proof of progress. The distinction between engineering achievement and scientific foundation has collapsed in the public discourse, and with it, the public's ability to judge what is real from what is sold.
Transparency is the only defense. If transformative technology is being built, the public, policymakers, and the research community itself need an honest, scientifically grounded account of where the work actually stands — what has foundation, what is proposal, what is speculation, and what is hype. Without that account, informed judgment is impossible, and without informed judgment, neither support nor opposition nor governance of AGI can be done well.
"This Is AGI. Prove Us Wrong." is built to produce that account. The event brings together researchers working on the scientific foundations of AGI and invites the audience to challenge every claim made on stage. After the event, an independent review board evaluates the statements — not just the individual presentations — by weighing the scientific grounding that each presentation brings to them. For each statement, the board publishes a verdict on where the grounded science stands: supported, opposed, contested, unsupported at this event, or outside scientific reach. Findings are published as a City AGI Report for each event. Findings from all cities are synthesized annually into a cumulative Annual AGI Report.
The Global Economic Alliance is a think tank researching the scientific foundations of AGI and the economic, governance, legal, and civilizational transformations AGI will bring. The "This Is AGI. Prove Us Wrong." event series is GEA's mechanism for putting its own research into public contact with other scientifically grounded research — so that the work can be tested against serious counter-argument, not shielded by publication or institutional distance.
This is why the event is structured around GEA's research and its statements about AGI. It is a think tank event, not a neutral convening. What makes the event distinct is not that GEA presents, but that GEA subjects its own work to the same independent review, audience challenge, and published scrutiny as every other presenter. GEA does not receive exemptions from the grounding standard or the review process. Presenters are invited precisely because the work is worth bringing into contact with GEA's — in agreement, disagreement, or from a different angle.
The Reports serve journalists, policymakers, researchers, and the public. Their purpose is to provide a grounded landscape map of scientific work on AGI — a description of the scientifically serious approaches being pursued, the disagreements between them, the grounded challenges they face, and the claims that do not meet the scientific grounding standard.
The Reports do not declare winners. No one has a theory of intelligence strong enough to rule between the serious competing approaches, and the Reports do not pretend otherwise. What the Reports do is filter for scientific seriousness, surface the real state of the argument, and publish it in a form that external readers can use to form their own informed judgments.
You have been invited to present at a "This Is AGI. Prove Us Wrong." event. GEA is a think tank researching the scientific foundations of AGI, and this event series is how GEA puts its research into public contact with other scientifically grounded research on AGI. For each event, GEA presents research behind a selected subset of its statements about AGI, and invited external researchers — that is, you — present their own work on the same statements. External work may support a statement, oppose it, or approach it from a different angle entirely.
The event is open to researchers whose work is grounded in a relevant scientific field — physics, neuroscience, biology, cognitive science, complexity science, information theory, or other sciences where AGI-relevant research is being done. The audience then gets to challenge every presenter, including GEA, under a scientific code of conduct. Every claim made on stage has to survive the room.
After the event, every presentation is evaluated by an independent review board against a set of scientific grounding criteria. The evaluations feed into the published City AGI Report. Each presenter may submit a written response to the board's evaluation, which is published as the presenter's final word in the Report.
Your presentation should take the science seriously. The event is not a forum for marketing claims, unfalsifiable speculation, or assertions without grounding. It is a forum for scientifically serious work, pursued from a range of perspectives that the mainstream AGI discourse does not usually bring into contact with one another.
In practice, this means your presentation should:
These are not stylistic preferences. They are what the review board evaluates. Full detail is in the Rules.
A presentation that reviews well is a presentation that takes grounding seriously and makes grounding visible. This usually means less technical detail, not more. A presentation heavy on engineering specifics without scientific grounding will review poorly. A presentation that is clear about its foundations, extensions, and reasoning will review well even if it stays at the conceptual level.
The review board is composed of scientists from a range of disciplines and does not privilege AI-industry framing. The board is evaluating whether your work is scientifically serious, not whether it is commercially plausible or whether it aligns with prevailing industry narratives. Prepare for that audience. Identify your foundations explicitly. Show the path from foundations to claims. Be honest about what is established and what is your extension.
The Rules that follow are the enforceable framework for the event and the Reports. They are numbered so that any question about what is expected can be answered by reference to a specific rule.
The most important rules for presenters to read carefully are:
A Common Questions appendix covers recurring situations that do not require a full rule.