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Sam Altman says OpenAI has yet to crack AGI.
The OpenAI CEO said that while the highly anticipated GPT-5, which launched Thursday, is a major advancement, it isn’t what he considers artificial general intelligence, a still theoretical threshold where AI can reason like humans.
Developing AGI that benefits all of humanity is OpenAI’s core mission.
“This is clearly a model that is generally intelligent, although I think in the way that most of us define AGI, we’re still missing something quite important, or many things quite important,” Altman told reporters during a press call on Wednesday before the release of GPT-5.
One of those missing elements, Altman said, is the model’s ability to learn on its own.
“One big one is, you know, this is not a model that continuously learns as it’s deployed from the new things it finds, which is something that to me feels like AGI. But the level of intelligence here, the level of capability, it feels like a huge improvement,” he said.
The exact definition of AGI and how far away the world-changing technology might be are topics of much debate in the AI industry.
Some AI leaders, like Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, have said we may still be “decades” away.
Altman said that looking back at OpenAI’s previous releases, GPT-5 is still a step in the right direction.
“If I could go back five years before GPT-3, and you told me we have this now, I’d be like, that’s a significant fraction of the way to something very AGI-like,” he said on Wednesday’s call.
In an earlier blog post, Altman wrote that he and OpenAI’s cofounders “started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history.”
While AGI remains the company’s mission, Altman says OpenAI is already looking beyond it to superintelligence, a still theoretical advancement in which artificial intelligence can reason far beyond human capability.
“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,” Altman wrote in January.
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