OpenAI’s CEO says we may have passed the point of AGI

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, claims that artificial general intelligence (AGI) may have quietly passed us by, and its social impact is much less than previously thought. From Altman’s point of view, we may have already reached full artificial intelligence, but this achievement has failed to revolutionize the world as expected.

To date there is no clear definition of what exactly AGI means. This term has apparently become a trending word that executives of large technology companies use with a different meaning each time. The widely accepted definition of this technology is that artificial intelligence is a very powerful artificial intelligence system that reaches the level of human cognitive abilities.

AI may not have been worth all the hype

The CEO of OpenAI, who appeared on a recent episode of the Big Technology podcast, said that we may have passed AGI without even realizing it. When asked whether the capabilities of the GPT-5 family of models have reached the level of AGI, Altman explained:

“One thing I really like is that we admit that we’ve been wrong about AI from the beginning because we never defined it properly. The new term that everyone is focusing on now is when will we reach superintelligence; So my suggestion is to agree that AI has passed us by. This technology did not change the world that much, or maybe it will change in the long run; But we can say, okay, we’ve built AGI. “At some point, we got to the point where some people think we’ve reached AGI and some don’t, but over time more and more people accept that we’ve reached this technology, and then they ask, what’s next?”

Sam Altman went on to explain artificial super-intelligence as the next goal: “A proposed definition of super-intelligence is this: when a system can perform better than any human using artificial intelligence in roles such as the presidency of the United States, the CEO of a large company, or, for example, a scientist who runs a very large laboratory.”

This is not the first time Altman has talked about achieving AGI. In 2024, he predicted that this sweet spot would be achieved within 5 years, explaining that this would happen with much less social impact than expected.