Artificial general intelligence (AGI) may have been every tech bro’s chant, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks that the term is increasingly becoming passé. Rapid advances in the AI race are making it harder to define the concept of AGI, which has led to the term losing its relevance, Altman said in an interview with CNBC.
Loosely defined, AGI refers to a form of artificial intelligence that could enable a system to perform any intellectual task at the same level as humans or even beyond it. Achieving this level of AI capability in a way that is safe and benefits all of humanity has been OpenAI’s core mission for years.
“I think it’s not a super-useful term,” the ChatGPT frontman was quoted as saying in response to a question about whether the company’s latest GPT-5 model moves the world any closer to achieving AGI.
Loosely defined, AGI refers to a form of artificial intelligence that could enable a system to perform any intellectual task at the same level of humans or even beyond it. Achieving this level of AI capability in a way that is safe and benefits all of humanity, has been OpenAI’s core mission for years.
Altman, who has previously suggested on multiple occasions that the Microsoft-backed AI startup is nearing AGI, has shifted stance more recently and attempted to downplay the significance of AGI. Instead, he has emphasised another concept called artificial superintelligence (ASI).
The problem with AGI is that there are multiple definitions being used by different companies and individuals. One definition is an AI that can do “a significant amount of the work in the world,” he said. However, that has its issues because the nature of work is constantly changing, according to Altman.
“I think the point of all of this is it doesn’t really matter and it’s just this continuing exponential of model capability that we’ll rely on for more and more things,” he added.
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The promise of AGI is said to be a major factor in AI companies like OpenAI successfully raising billions of dollars and receiving staggeringly high valuations. Based on its latest funding round, OpenAI is worth $300 billion, and the company is reportedly gearing up for a another share sale at a valuation of $500 billion.
To be sure, AGI continues to be a major goal for OpenAI. But Altman believes that progress should be measured differently.
“We try now to use these different levels … rather than the binary of, ‘is it AGI or is it not?’ I think that became too coarse as we get closer,” Altman had said during a talk at the FinRegLab AI Symposium in November last year. He has further said that AI-driven breakthroughs in fields such as mathematics and science will be achieved in the next two years or so.
Earlier this month, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5, its latest large language model (LLM) that is freely accessible by ChatGPT users globally. OpenAI has said that the AI model is smarter, faster, and more useful, especially when it comes to writing and coding-related tasks as well as answering health-related queries.
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However, the launch of GPT-5 has drawn criticism, with some saying that the AI model offers only marginal improvements over its predecessors, such as GPT-4o.
Accepting that GPT-5 is not at AGI-level yet, Altman said at a media roundtable, “The idea that you have a system that can answer almost any question, do some tasks, and write software for you at PhD levels of expertise… most people, if they heard that five years ago, would have said ‘absolutely impossible’.”
“The impact this is having on education, health care, productivity, economic growth, scientific discovery, and the like is ‘quite special’,” he added.