Despite the speculations about the advent of AGI becoming an everyday affair, it seems to be real now when Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI in conversation with Gary Tan said that AGI could be within reach as early as 2025. In fact, they are getting there faster than people expect.
They are on the right track and know what is to be done. It is difficult but still it is all very exciting. Altman’s optimism is based on the internal developments. Outside the company, the very mention of AGI is treated as a crazy and impossible idea. Still they keep pushing the envelope. OpenAI may lack the resources others have, but they have the focus. It is the median view of the researchers at OpenAI. AGI is closer than what most people think.
They had published a paper in which agents employ self-supervised learning with multiple rounds of emergent strategies. There is multi-agent competition. It adapts to complex environments. It leads to skills similar to human tasks. All this was five years ago, where OpenAI reached the third stage — agents. First was chatbots, second the reasoners, and third the agentic experiences (L1 to L2 to L3). The next stage L4 will be that of AI creators and L5 will be that of organizational AI.
OpenAI’s latest model o1 is a significant leap towards AGI. It will advance to Agents with human-level reasoning. (Level 3). It is for this reason that Altman declares that AGI is achievable with current hardware.
OpenAI will also launch its own GPU chip in 2026. Nvidia has already delivered its advanced Blackwell AI chips to OpenAI and Microsoft in October, 2024.
Recently, OpenAI introduced a crucial clause in its contract with Microsoft — as and when OpenAI achieves AGI, Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies. It is a leverage for a better deal. Under the terms of contract, it is OpenAI which will decide when AGI has arrived. It could be a loophole to get out of the contract. It is, however, certain that Microsoft will not stop OpenAI to realize its AGI dreams. In a developers’ conference, in Dec. 2023, both OpenAI and Microsoft declared that their partnership would help build AI together. The support of Azure cloud was crucial for OpenAI.
It should be noted that OpenAI and Microsoft are not the only ones in the race. Google has rolled out Gemini 1.5, Gemma 3, NotebookLM and Data Gemma. Gemini 2 has better reasoning. Meta plans to release Llama 4 by early 2025. It pushes the company towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence (AMI). There are others such as Anthropic, xAI. Just getting close to AGI is a big miracle.