No, OpenAI's AGI is not launching soon, "nor have we built it"

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s boss, is quickly putting an end to rumors about OpenAI’s AGI technology.

The AI wizz updates on X that OpenAI is “not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it.” He says further that the company has “some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!”

OpenAI’s AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is perhaps one of the most hyped techs that’s coming out of the Microsoft-backed company in recent times.

In a blog post earlier this year, Altman confidently stated that the company, which has $157 billion in valuation, knows how to build AGI and expects AI agents to join the workforce in 2025. So, if the calculation is correct, we could see OpenAI’s AGI coming in at least the next years or so although the company is clearly hyping it up in recent months.

“This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again,” Altman says in the post.

The AI boom is surely fast, even a few months can make a lot of difference. But we’re still behind in developing AGI, the type of AI that can learn, apply, and understand everything and in all forms of intelligence just like a human can. It’s not like regular large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s o1 and o3, for example, that excel in a specific task like reasoning.

In its textbook definition, OpenAI describes AGI as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” And it could lead to a lot of scientific breakthroughs that can change the way we work more than it already does. Or, creates a potential disruptive societal change with workforce automation becoming a norm.

“My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it will matter much less,” he previously said in a December interview.