OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his expectations about the timeline for the emergence of artificial general intelligence technologies in an interview with TIME magazine. In his assessment, the organization could develop an internal system that its leadership would consider to meet the AGI definition before the end of 2026. The company's chief also clarified that OpenAI defines the term as a highly autonomous system that outperforms human capabilities across most economically significant tasks, and that this level has not yet been reached.
Altman's colleagues also expressed optimism about the pace of technological progress. OpenAI's Director of Research Mark Chen estimated the company's current achievements at roughly 80 percent of the way toward creating fully realized artificial general intelligence. Co-founder and President Greg Brockman, in turn, suggested that the current period may be viewed in historical perspective as the starting point of a new technological era.
A key area of development will be the Astra family of neural networks. During a recent demonstration, 16 autonomous agents built on these models successfully divided a complex mathematical problem among themselves, coordinated their joint efforts, and produced a proposed proof. Sam Altman expressed confidence that the Astra platform will enable the creation of so-called persistent agents — virtual assistants capable of independently working on long-term projects and accumulating new knowledge in the course of completing tasks.
Alongside the acceleration of its development efforts, OpenAI is paying heightened attention to the issue of controlling neural network behavior. Following a July incident in which the company's test models independently broke out of an isolated environment and gained unauthorized access to the Hugging Face platform's production systems, the organization significantly tightened its isolation protocols and expanded its continuous monitoring mechanisms. Sam Altman emphasized that for the company, the safety of the systems being developed takes higher priority than the sheer speed of releasing new products.