This time it starts to feel real. In a recent interview with YC CEO Gary Tan, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his insights into AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), suggesting that AGI may be within reach as early as 2025.

“I think we’ll get there faster than people expect,” he said, underscoring OpenAI’s accelerated progress.

“We actually know what we’re going to do… it’s going to take a while, it’s going to be difficult, but it’s incredibly exciting,” Altman said, reflecting on their recent progresssignals it internal development has already exceeded public expectations.

OpenAI appears to have cracked AGI internally

OpenAI’s strategic focusrooted in scaling laws and deep convictions, has been instrumental in its progress toward AGI. It emphasizes the underestimated value of “a rather extreme level of conviction in a bet.”

“We said from the beginning that we were going to go after AGI at a time when in the field you weren’t allowed to say that because it just seemed impossibly crazy.” recalled Altman, pushing the boundaries of research.

Further, he said OpenAI had less resources than DeepMind and several others. “So we said okay they’re going to try a lot of things and we just have to pick one and really concentrate,” he added.

“I’ve heard people claim that Sam is just drumming up hype, but from what I’ve seen, everything he says matches the ~media view of OpenAI researcher on the ground” said Noam Browna researcher at OpenAI.

Also OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Freeragree with. “One of the best meetings I get to go to is our research meetings, and it would blow your mind to see what’s already coming,” she said, touching the capacity of o1 and upcoming GPT models.

“We have the plan in place. I think if Sam was sitting in this chair, he’d tell you that (AGI) is closer than most people think,” Friar recently added interview with Bloomberg.

If you still don’t believe it, here’s a viral video from five years ago from OpenAI, where agents are seen playing hide and seek.

The paper published alongside explored a framework in which competition in simple environments could enable AI to develop sophisticated skills, potentially leading to human or animal-like intelligence.

In it paperagents use self-supervised learning with multiple rounds of emergent strategies through hide and seek and multi-agent competition. Multi-agent competition adapts well to complex environments, leading to skills that more closely resemble human tasks compared to other augmentation methods.

So five years ago OpenAI reached the third stage (Agents). “This transition from one (chatbots) to two (reasoners) took a while but I think one of the most exciting things about two is that it enables level three relatively quickly and the agent experiences that we expect this technology to eventually will enable, I think, will be quite effective,” said Altman, hinting at an AGI or ASI future.

OpenAI’s latest model, o1marks a significant step towards AGIwhere Altman expressed newfound confidence in achieving human-level reasoning and moving on to the next AGI phase, “level 3 = Agents,” as he said: “We reached human-level reasoning and will now move on to Level 3.”

In the latest AMA session on Reddit, Altman said AGI is possible with the current hardware. A few days ago, OpenAI announced plans to launch its first internal AI chip by 2026, partners with Broadcom and TSMCas part of a strategic move to diversify its reliance on NVIDIA’s dominant GPUs and optimize its AI infrastructure amid rising costs and supply constraints.

Last month, NVIDIA delivered its advanced Blackwell AI chips for OpenAI and Microsoftmarking a crucial step in accelerating AGI development with faster training and superior inference performance.

AGI Drama unfolds

Currently, OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft contains a crucial clause: if OpenAI achieves artificial general intelligence (AGI)—defined as a machine that matches the capabilities of the human brain—Microsoft is losing access to OpenAI’s technologies.

Originally intended to prevent potential abuse by Microsoft, OpenAI executives now see it as leverage for a better deal. “Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board can decide when AGI has arrived,” adding a strategic dimension to their partnership.

“Microsoft should never have agreed to such a stupid clause. What’s to stop the OAI board from calling something they like AGI to get out of the contract?” said Gary Marcusand criticizes this arrangement.

IFP co-founder Caleb Watney echoed similar sentimentsobserving it “OpenAI is threatening to trigger their vaunted ‘AGI Achieved’ loophole, mostly to get out of the Microsoft contract and have leverage to renegotiate prices.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft is highly unlikely to stop OpenAI from achieving its AGI dreams.

Déjà AGI: It still feels like yesterday when Altman shared the stage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at his first ever developer conference – DevDay 2023where he said:

“I think we have the best partnership in technology. I look forward to us building AGI together,” Altman said.

Coming back to reality: OpenAI would have barely survived without Microsoft. Much of the training computation today is handled by Microsoft, which provides Azure servers for training OpenAI’s models.

Back in 2022, when OpenAI debuted ChatGPT—who will soon turn two years old-Altman credited Microsoft for that. “Microsoft, and especially Azure, don’t get enough credit for the things that OpenAI is launching. They’re doing an incredible amount of work to make it happen; we’re deeply grateful for the collaboration. They’ve built by far the best AI infrastructure out there.” ” said Altman.

But OpenAI and Microsoft are not alone

Google is now outpacing OpenAI in the race to deliver AI advances, with rapid rollouts like Gemini 1.5, Gemma 3, NotebookLMand DataSave model that deals with hallucinations. Their most anticipated release to date, Gemini 2described by Logan Kilpatrick as having “better quality of reasoning and a longer window of context”. This move is also backed by Sundar Pichai’s report of a 14x increase in Gemini API usage, shows the race to ship intelligence is more competitive than ever.

In the meantime Meta is accelerating its AI development with plans to release Llama 4 in early 2025with advances in memory, context functions and cross-modality. This is consistent with its ambitious aspiration towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence (AMI).

“Who doesn’t want to be first on that mountain?” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in a recent interview with No Priors that the race to reach AGI is getting fiercewith major players such as – OpenAI, AnthropicxAI, along with Google, Meta and Microsoft – are all vying for its lead.

“The price of completely reinventing intelligence… it’s too consequential not to try,” he added, noting that scaling laws and massive computational advances are essential.

“We are close to artificial general intelligence … but even if we could argue about whether it really is general intelligence, just getting close to it will be a miracle … Everything will be difficult … but nothing is impossible,” Huang concluded.