It’s only Tuesday but OpenAI has had a great week so far, seemingly making forgotten all the talk about DeepSeek. That’s the viral AI from China that challenged the best ChatGPT model last week, tanking the US stock market in the process.
Since Friday, OpenAI has made several announcements. First, ChatGPT o3-mini and o3-mini-high were released to all ChatGPT users. On Sunday, OpenAI unveiled the ChatGPT Deep Research model, which is available to ChatGPT Pro users. On Monday, OpenAI confirmed that it plans to make a piece of ChatGPT hardware to challenge the smartphone, something we all expected.
On Monday, OpenAI’s finances became a hot topic. Sam Altman was in Japan to kickstart a local venture with local giant SoftBank. The “SB OpenAI Japan” joint venture will see SoftBank spend $3 billion on securing access to ChatGPT for all its subsidiaries.
Separately, SoftBank will invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI in the near future, which could make the Japanese giant the biggest investor in the ChatGPT maker. Remember that SoftBank is also a key partner on the already announced $500 Stargate AI infrastructure plan for OpenAI.
In this context, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said he was wrong about AGI, or artificial general intelligence. This massive milestone in AI development is coming earlier than he thought. That suggests the next-gen ChatGPT upgrade might be closer than we thought, and it may very well be. But you probably shouldn’t get too excited about experiencing AGI on your own just yet.
“I now realize that AGI would come much earlier,” Son said on Monday. According to The Wall Street Journal, Son predicted a few months ago that AGI would be achieved within two or three years. That timeline is in line with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent remarks that AGI might be here in 2026 or 2027.
Earlier this year, Altman penned a blog post in which he teased that AGI is close and that his company knows how to reach this ChatGPT milestone. “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” he said, reminding us that AGI is just a term that can mean anything.
As for how OpenAI understands AGI, the company’s definition mentions “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
The OpenAI-Microsoft definition of AGI is AI that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. When that happens, Microsoft will stop having access to OpenAI tech. Until the SoftBank rumored investment is confirmed, Microsoft will remain OpenAI’s biggest investor.
That’s not to say Son’s remarks on Monday aren’t important; they are. After all, he’s ready to invest tens of billions into AI tech, whose potentially brilliant future isn’t guaranteed. That’s why he must be privy to the inner workings of ChatGPT in ways we can’t imagine. Son saying that AGI will be here sooner than expected can’t be just marketing hype, which a CEO could also be prone to.
But it’s important to remember that the definition of AGI isn’t perfectly clear. The lines can be moved to serve certain interests. AGI is considered the kind of intelligence where AI will be able to handle any tasks you’d entrust it with with the same approach as a human.
However, AGI would have the advantage of having access to massive sources of information during training and new ones, on-demand, via a live connection to the internet. AGI would, therefore, exceed human abilities to some degree.
Son’s AGI reference might be about something else. He’s still referring to highly capable AI models but in the context of the corporate world, which has access to the resources needed to make AGI possible. Here’s how The Journal details Son’s AGI expectations.
Son said that artificial general intelligence, in which computers have human-level cognitive abilities, will likely be realized faster in the world of big corporations than that of individuals because the former has ample financial resources and vast amounts of specific data to train computers.
That is, we shouldn’t expect AGI to come cheap. Regular AI isn’t that cheap either, no matter the breakthroughs from DeepSeek.
Put differently, it’s likely that OpenAI will develop more advanced ChatGPT tools soon, including AI agents and next-gen models, which would bring us closer to AGI. But it’s possible those tools will be reserved for ChatGPT Enterprise users who are ready to pay the extra processing costs associated with AGI performance.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT users like you and I might have to wait a little longer for the AGI experience for the home. That ChatGPT model won’t be cheap, but it could arrive years after the AGI for Enterprise is reached when computing efficiencies are achieved.
This is speculation, mostly because AGI is a theoretical term that might not mean anything in the real world. With the goalposts shifting, we might see different definitions of AGI in the near future.
What’s clear is that multiple AI firms will reach versions of AGI in the coming years, not just OpenAI. ChatGPT won’t be the only option, whether it’s for big corporations or regular consumers. When those versions of AGI are ready, AI firms will want to make a big deal about them to sell versions of AGI to all sorts of interested buyers.
Back to ChatGPT, as that’s the main product Son’s companies will use; I’ll remind you that OpenAI has yet to announce an upgrade for GPT-4o. There’s been talk about GPT-5 delays, and some people associated the model with AGI in the past. It’s unclear when ChatGPT will be deployed.
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