Nvidia CEO Says GPT-6 Astra Brings AGI Closer

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang once again trumpeted the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Huang congratulated OpenAI in a Sunday (Sept. 6) post on social platform X after the startup released its latest AI model, which was trained on Nvidia’s chips.

“From ChatGPT to o1 to Astra in 4 years,” Huang said in the post. “AGI has arrived. Congratulations @OpenAI team.”

AGI is a “fuzzy concept” that has nevertheless become a critical target for companies like OpenAI, Business Insider reported Monday (Sept. 7).

Google, for example, defines it as “the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that possesses the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can,” while OpenAI says AGI refers to “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

OpenAI called its Astra model, released last week, the world’s “most intelligent and aligned model,” able to perform “the most demanding professional work with unmatched speed, accuracy and judgment.”

Greg Brockman, the company’s president, later welcomed reporters to “the AGI era” during a call following the model’s rollout, the Business Insider report said.

Huang told the Lex Friedman podcast in March that “I think we’ve achieved AGI,” although he seemed to walk back that claim somewhat later in the interview, The Verge reported March 23.

Meanwhile, AI pioneer Andrew Ng said earlier this year that the industry is decades away from AGI, which he defined as AI that can perform any intellectual task that humans can, like learning how to drive a truck or crafting a PhD thesis.

Another prediction came in March, this time from Tesla head Elon Musk, who predicted that AGI could be ushered in by his company’s Optimus robots.

Machines “that perceive, reason and act in the physical world may be on a more direct path to AGI than software running in a data center ever was,” PYMNTS reported March 11. “If that thesis is right, the physical AI buildout now underway is not just a manufacturing story. It is the early infrastructure of something considerably larger.”

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