How OpenAI's Sam Altman Is Thinking About AGI and Superintelligence in 2025

How OpenAI’s Sam Altman Is Thinking About AGI and Superintelligence in 2025 | TIME Tech AI How OpenAI’s Sam Altman Is Thinking About AGI and Superintelligence in 2025 ADD TIME ON GOOGLE Show me more content from TIME on Google Search by Tharin Pillay Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Loading... Sam Altman, co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI, speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit in New York City in December. Sam Altman, co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI, speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit in New York City in December. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images by Tharin Pillay Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Loading... OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently published a post on his personal blog reflecting on AI progress and his predictions for how the technology will impact humanity’s future. “We are now confident we know how to build AGI [artificial general intelligence] as we have traditionally understood it,”Altman wrote. He added that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is beginning to turn its attention to superintelligence. While there is no universally accepted definition for AGI, OpenAI has historically defined it as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” Although AI systems already outperform humans in narrow domains, such as chess, the key to AGI is generality. Such a system would be able to, for example, manage a complex coding project from start to finish, draw on insights from biology to solve engineering problems, or write a Pulitzer-worthy novel. OpenAI says its mission is to “ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.” Altman indicated in his post that advances in the technology could lead to more noticeable adoption of AI in the workplace in the coming year, in the form of AI agents —autonomous systems that can perform specific tasks without human intervention, potentially taking actions for days at a time. “In 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce⁠’⁠ and materially change the output of companies,” hewrote. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Altman said he thinks “AGI will probably get developed during [Trump’s] term,” while noting his belief that AGI “has become a very sloppy term.” Competitors also think AGI is close: Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, who runs AI startup xAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, have both said they think AI systems could outsmart humans by 2026. In the largest survey of AI researchers to date, which included over 2,700 participants, researchers collectively estimated there is a 10% chance that AI systems can outperform humans on most tasks by 2027, assuming science continues progressing without interruption. Advertisement Others are more skeptical. Gary Marcus, a prominent AI commentator, disagrees with Altman that AGI is “basically a solved problem,” while Mustafa Suleyman , CEO of Microsoft AI, has said , regarding whether AGI can be achieved on today’s hardware,“the uncertainty around this is s

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