There is endless talk about AGI and the date of its arrival. It is being counted now — how many steps we are short of achieving AGI. OpenAI has come out with o1 model. Altman recapitulates the development of AI. He puts ChatGPT as level 1. The next stages are agents, innovators and fully autonomous organizations.
So far, we have travelled from level 1 of ChatGPT to level 2 of reasoners — o1 model. We should reach level three pretty quickly. It is called agentic AI. OpenAI will build AI agents for customer service. It will be a mix of o1 model and APIs. In fact, model o1 with reasoning ability has thrown open the gates to AGI.
It was previously believed that AGI will require a new approach, and it may not materialize with LLMs. The results given by o1 model has changed this thinking. We can visualize a GPT-5 powered model with CoT reasoning. The chips here would be more powerful, say Groq chips. This perhaps would make AGI possible.
Many think that OpenAI is on the right track. Of course, it is hard to fill the AGI until a model materializes which is better than humans at a domain.
The third level of AI agents is being tried by Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft. These are integrated across organizations’ processes. Oracle has announced 50 + AI agents. Salesforce has announced 100+ agents. These are semi-autonomous now. Open AI may be referring to fully autonomous agents.
The next level could be of those fully autonomous agents. This technology would have a great impact. Altman calls this stage as level 4. The final stage 5 is that of innovators and organizations.
AI systems thus can run processes. They go beyond and improve them significantly. They will do this independently.
Organization is that stage where the entire work of a company will be performed independently. There would be no human intervention.
Though it is difficult to predict the arrival of AGI, but the path is now clear, in fact clearer than ever before. Level 3 of Agent AI has already started playing. The Big Tech is only two steps away from the real thing — AGI.
Altman calls this superintelligent age. Humanity is on the brink of a transformative era. The change is not genetic. It is a change in infrastructure.
According to Altman, superintelligent AI could arrive in a few thousand days, though it may take longer. But he is confident that we will get there.
Deep learning is the accelerator. It has worked, and is getting better with scale and the allocation of resources.
He is concerned about the cost of computing power. AI may become a scare resource, meant for the affluent. If we want to spread AI widely, we should curtail the cost of compute and make it abundant — lots of energy and chips.
AI, as Altman puts it, will lead to massive prosperity. The future will fast forward a hundred years from today.