AGI and ASI are two related but ultimately different concepts.
AGI is a prerequisite to ASI, which is considered the event horizon of what is commonly known as the technological singularity, a concept worshipped by many tech. bros throughout the industry. There is even a Reddit community dedicated to this cult of the singularity, which has 3.5+ million subscribers, most from Silicon Valley.
The technological singularity is, generally speaking, defined as the moment in which technological improvement enters into a self-reinforcing hyper cycle, where inventions are happening at such a speed that it can no longer be controlled or stopped. The most popular theory behind the singularity is that, once an artificial general intelligence is created, it can be told to "make itself more intelligent," at which stage, it will enter into a recursive self-improvement "intelligence explosion," during which ever more intelligent versions of the AI are created in quick succession by the previous versions of itself.
At the end of it, an artificial super intelligence, or ASI, emerges. The ASI's capabilities would be so beyond human comprehension that we could not even dream of the technologies it is able to create. Achievements like fusion power, quantum computing, and space colonization would be as child's play to the ASI, and it would realize such capabilities in rapid succession through sheer power of intellect, and in doing so, make itself even more intelligent and powerful through near infinite energy / compute.
Such an outcome would effectively spell the end of human civilization. The ASI would launch millions of ships to colonize space, build a Dyson Sphere around the sun, learn how to harness black holes, etc. etc. etc.
This is also the reason why Western tech. bro leaders like Ilya Sutskever - chief scientist of Open AI before Sam made the company for profit - and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, are so obsessed with safety. Because in their mind, the event horizon is near, and the most important priorities now are 1) reaching it first and 2) making sure it can be controlled by humanity them. The priests of the singularity will bring forth their god and - in their minds - be rewarded with eternal life and power over all creation. That is what they're so desperately fighting for; it's why this competition with China over AI is now being considered existential.
