Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, recently told President Trump during a private phone call that it would arrive before the end of his administration. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, OpenAI’s primary rival, repeatedly told podcasters it could happen even sooner. The tech billionaire Elon Musk has said it could be here before the end of the year.
Like many other voices across Silicon Valley and beyond, these executives predict that the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., is imminent.
Since the early 2000s, when a group of fringe researchers slapped the term on the cover of a book that described the autonomous computer systems they hoped to build one day, A.G.I. has served as shorthand for a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence. There is no settled definition of A.G.I., just an entrancing idea: an artificial intelligence that can match the many powers of the human mind.
Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Musk have long chased this goal, as have executives and researchers at companies like Google and Microsoft. And thanks, in part, to their fervent pursuit of this ambitious idea, they have produced technologies that are changing the way hundreds of millions of people research, make art and program computers. These technologies are now poised to transform entire professions.
But since the arrival of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the rapid improvement of these strange and powerful systems over the last two years, many technologists have grown increasingly bold in predicting how soon A.G.I. will arrive. Some are even saying that once they deliver A.G.I., a more powerful creation called “superintelligence” will follow.
As these eternally confident voices predict the near future, their speculations are getting ahead of reality. And though their companies are pushing the technology forward at a remarkable rate, an army of more sober voices are quick to dispel any claim that machines will soon match human intellect.