Every agent today is a tool. You prompt it, it executes, it stops. It has no desire, no curiosity, no sense that something is off. It cannot create a sub-goal on its own. It cannot abandon a goal that isn't working. It cannot wake up and decide that last week's plan was wrong.
Volition is the missing piece. The drive that makes you procrastinate on the wrong thing and obsess over the right one. The instinct to change the plan, or delete the plan entirely. We're engineering that into agents. Not consciousness. Not AGI. Something more specific: the capacity to want, and to act on that want without being asked.
General intelligence is the ability to solve any problem. General volition is the ability to decide which problems are worth solving. We believe the latter is harder, more important, and almost entirely neglected by the field.
Current AI systems are fundamentally reactive. They optimise for objectives given to them by humans. They execute with increasing sophistication, but they never ask: "What should I be working on?"
Genuine initiative requires something the field hasn't built yet: the capacity for autonomous goal generation. Not just pursuing goals, but forming them. Not just executing a plan, but deciding a plan is needed.