Sam Altman says OpenAI will have AGI by the end of 2026 if you accept his definition
OpenAI’s leadership believes AGI is within reach, according to a TIME report. The company’s upcoming model Astra already works as an automated research intern, according to chief scientist Jakub Pachocki.
Whether it can actually “invent new things in a way that matters,” as Altman claims, is heavily debated. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is convinced his company will have an internal system he’d call artificial general intelligence (AGI) by the end of the year, even though they’re “not quite yet” there. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen estimates OpenAI is “80% of the way” to AGI. Co-founder Greg Brockman believes people will look back on this period as the moment AGI emerged. That’s according to an extensive TIME report by Alex Heath, who spent more than two weeks interviewing over 20 executives, employees, investors, and rivals.Ad Astra is meant to work as an automated AI research intern At the center of this AGI confidence is Astra, OpenAI’s upcoming model family. This is the system OpenAI announced last year as an automated AI research intern.Ad Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki told TIME that Astra already hits that internal benchmark. Hand it an experimental idea, and it can write the code in OpenAI’s codebase, run the experiment, and report back with results. Give it a research paper, and it can handle work that would have taken a human researcher about a week. Astra also enables “persistent agents,” virtual coworkers that tackle tasks on their own over longer periods. Altman sees the biggest payoff in generating new knowledge. “I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters,” he said during a customer preview, according to TIME. “That’s a very AGI-like thing.”Ad The underlying wager is that a system like this could kick off recursive self-improvement, where AI helps make itself better. Opinions are split. Some researchers think that kind of capability is still far off. Others see early signs it’s already happening.
