Nvidia's CEO announced the dawn of the "AGI era" following the release of OpenAI's new AI model
Admittedly, this isn't the first time Jensen Huang has done this
Nvidia's CEO Congratulated OpenAI on the Release of Its New AI Model / Photo: Nvidia
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a manufacturer of processors and graphics cards, announced the dawn of the “era of general artificial intelligence” (AGI) following the release of the latest and most powerful model from OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. AGI refers to artificial intelligence that surpasses human capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. Not everyone agrees with Huang that OpenAI has crossed this threshold.
Details
“From ChatGPT through [the first reasoning model] o1 to Astra in four years. AGI has arrived. Congratulations to the OpenAI team,” Huang wrote on the social media platform X.
Huang also pointed out that Astra was trained on Nvidia chips.
Huang also pointed out that Astra was trained on Nvidia chips.
OpenAI unveiled Astra on September 3. According to the company, the new AI model is a leader in software development, science, and cybersecurity, and outperforms even the most advanced AI models from its competitor, Anthropic.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman said at a press briefing on September 3 that the new model “represents a generational leap in capabilities” and that it can be considered general artificial intelligence, according to the FT.
Is Huang right?
This isn't the first time the head of Nvidia has declared the dawn of the AGI era, as Business Insider points out. In March, podcast host Lex Friedman suggested to him that AGI be defined as an artificial intelligence system capable of creating, developing, and effectively managing a tech company valued at over $1 billion from scratch. “I think it’s happening right now. I believe we have achieved AGI,” Huang replied at the time.
However, not everyone agrees with Nvidia’s CEO. AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus stated in a Substack blog post on September 7 that Huang had concluded that AGI had arrived without providing evidence or a clear definition of what that means. “By conventional definitions, Astra still falls short [of general artificial intelligence]. Declaring victory without a clear definition simply muddies the waters,” Marcus wrote.
Researchers from the ARC Prize project—whose test results OpenAI cited during its presentation of Astra—also refrained from calling the AI model a full-fledged AGI, according to BI. They described the model’s performance as a major step forward but emphasized that a high benchmark score does not prove the creation of AGI. The experts noted that the tests are conducted under strictly controlled conditions that do not reflect the full complexity and unpredictability of the real world, the publication writes.
Sam Altman, the CEO of the startup, noted in a recent episode of the “Sources” podcast that AGI is, at best, an “extremely poorly defined” concept. “I would even say it’s a marketing term with no practical significance,” he asserted.
In January, Elon Musk said that humanity had “entered the technological singularity,” describing it as a point of no return beyond which AI begins to evolve at a rate beyond the reach of the human mind.
In May, Mark Andriessen, co-founder of the venture capital fund A16z, claimed that the AGI threshold had been crossed about three months earlier. According to him, several cutting-edge developments had already become “as smart as humans,” BI reports.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
