Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a clear denial on social platform X regarding the claim that "OpenAI has achieved Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)." He stated that despite the growing discussions about AGI in the public sphere, OpenAI will not deploy AGI next month and has not developed this technology. Altman urged everyone to lower their expectations by "100 times."
AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, refers to an AI that can understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task that a human can. Recently, some AI enthusiasts mistakenly interpreted certain content released by OpenAI employees as evidence of achieving AGI, leading to widespread misunderstandings. While OpenAI is indeed working on launching a series of new AI reasoning models and released some related updates last month, the realization of AGI remains a distant goal.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed through Midjourney
For some time now, Altman and the OpenAI team have been actively promoting new reasoning models. Altman mentioned in a podcast that he believes OpenAI has mastered the key technologies for building AGI and predicted that this year we might see AI agents enter the workforce for the first time. He also noted that in the coming thousands of days, humanity might witness the emergence of superintelligence.
However, some recent commentators, particularly AI-focused author Gwern Branwen, have intensified rumors about OpenAI potentially achieving AGI internally. In a post on social media, he claimed that OpenAI is on the verge of a breakthrough and even speculated that it may have crossed a critical threshold. In response, OpenAI's top researcher Noam Brown also spoke out, pointing out that there is a lot of vague AI hype on social media, and while he remains optimistic about further progress, there are still many unresolved research issues that need to be addressed.
Although OpenAI continues to make progress in AI technology, there is still a long way to go before achieving true AGI. Altman's call for fans to temper their expectations is particularly important.
