Superintelligence in sight, but OpenAI has not built AGI yet, says Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to social media today to clarify that his startup, which ignited the AI race with ChatGPT, has not yet built AGI.

Published on: Jan 20, 2025, 15:40:57 IST

By Sanya Jain

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OpenAI has long said that its mission is to build AGI or Artificial General Intelligence - AI systems that are generally smarter than humans. However, the day may not come anytime soon. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to social media today to clarify that his startup, which ignited the AI race with ChatGPT, has not yet built AGI.

Sam Altman, 39, is the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI (AFP)

“Twitter hype is out of control again. We are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it,” Altman posted on X as he asked fans to “cut their expectations” by 100 times.

Take a look at his clarification below:

Altman has himself to blame for the hype - in a blog post shared on January 6, he said that OpenAI knows how to build AGI and would deploy it this year itself.

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” he wrote.

Altman, 39, said that OpenAI is aiming at “superintelligence in the true sense of the word” that would transform industries and accelerate scientific innovation.

“We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future,” he wrote in his blog post. “Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”

OpenAI’s mission

OpenAI’s mission statement from 2023, posted on its website, states that its purpose is to build AGI for the benefit of humanity.

However, the company acknowledges that there are “massive risks” to this technology.

“We want AGI to empower humanity to maximally flourish in the universe. We don’t expect the future to be an unqualified utopia, but we want to maximize the good and minimize the bad, and for AGI to be an amplifier of humanity,” says OpenAI.

A number of high profile voices have raised concerns about current AI research, including Elon Musk and Geoff Hinton, who is considered the “Godfather of AI.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sanya Jain
Sanya Jain is an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times Digital. She has nearly a decade of experience in covering offbeat stories that speak to the everyday experience - from viral videos to human interest copies that spark conversation. Her interests stretch across business, pop culture, social media trends, entertainment and global affairs. Before joining Hindustan Times, Sanya spent two years with Moneycontrol and five years with NDTV. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and a master’s in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. Sanya has a sharp eye for spotting emerging trends and looking for newsworthy angles to elevate viral posts into meaningful narratives. She was the first one, for example, to cover Narayana Murthy’s remark on 70-hour work weeks that sparked a national conversation. She is equally at ease writing about business leaders as about the common man, about issues of national importance and memes that amuse social media. Sanya enjoys speaking with content creators, newsmakers and entrepreneurs to transform everyday moments into engaging, slice-of-life stories that resonate with readers. When she is not working, Sanya can be found curled up with a good book. Born and raised in Lucknow, she has spent the last several years in Delhi. She is deeply interested in animal welfare and now spends a lot of her time running after her destructive orange cat.Read More

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