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How OpenAI's Sam Altman Is Thinking About AGI and Superintelligence in 2025
webCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: TIME
A mainstream news summary of Altman's early-2025 public statements on AGI timelines; useful for tracking how OpenAI leadership publicly frames AGI and superintelligence progress, and for comparing industry leader forecasts with researcher surveys.
Metadata
Importance: 45/100news articlenews
Summary
A TIME article summarizing Sam Altman's January 2025 blog post and Bloomberg interview, in which he claims OpenAI knows how to build AGI and is shifting focus toward superintelligence. Altman predicts AI agents will materially enter the workforce in 2025 and suggests AGI may arrive during the current U.S. presidential term. The piece also surveys competing views from Musk, Amodei, and skeptics like Gary Marcus.
Key Points
- •Altman stated OpenAI is 'confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it' and is turning attention to superintelligence.
- •OpenAI defines AGI as 'a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work,' emphasizing generality over narrow performance.
- •Altman predicts AI agents will 'join the workforce' in 2025 and materially change company output, operating autonomously for days at a time.
- •Competitors Elon Musk and Dario Amodei both predict AI could surpass human intelligence by 2026; a survey of 2,700 AI researchers estimates 10% chance by 2027.
- •Prominent skeptics like Gary Marcus dispute claims that AGI is 'basically a solved problem,' highlighting ongoing disagreement about timelines and definitions.
Cited by 3 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI Timelines | Concept | 95.0 |
| OpenAI | Organization | 62.0 |
| Sam Altman: Track Record | -- | 60.0 |
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- [Tech](https://time.com/section/tech)
- [AI](https://time.com/tag/ai)
# How OpenAI’s Sam Altman Is Thinking About AGI and Superintelligence in 2025
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by
[Tharin Pillay](https://time.com/author/tharin-pillay/)
Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.
Jan 8, 2025 4:25 PM ET
Sam Altman, co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI, speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit in New York City in December.
Sam Altman, co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI, speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit in New York City in December. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
by
[Tharin Pillay](https://time.com/author/tharin-pillay/)
Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.
Jan 8, 2025 4:25 PM ET
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently published a [post](https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections) on his personal blog reflecting on AI progress and his predictions for how the technology will impact humanity’s future. “We are now confident we know how to build AGI \[artificial general intelligence\] as we have traditionally understood it,”Altman wrote. He added that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is beginning to turn its attention to superintelligence.
While there is no universally accepted definition for AGI, OpenAI has historically [defined](https://openai.com/our-structure/) it as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” Although AI systems already outperform humans in narrow domains, such as chess, the key to AGI is generality. Such a system would be able to, for example, manage a complex coding project from start to finish, draw on insights from biology to solve engineering problems, or write a Pulitzer-worthy novel. OpenAI says its mission is to “ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.”
Altman indicated in his post that advances in the technology could lead to more noticeable adoption of AI in the workplace in the coming year, in the form of AI [agents](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-11/openai-sets-levels-to-track-progress-toward-superintelligent-ai?embedded-checkout=true)—autonomous systems that can perform specific tasks without human intervention, potentially taking actions for days at a time. “In 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” hewrote.
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