1) the two decisions do not seem related to each other. OpenAI has capital to spend and is seeking distribution methods to shore up continued access to future capital. That strategic decision seems totally unrelated to their estimated timelines for when AGI (whatever definition you are using) will show up. Especially because they are in a race against other players. It may be a soft signal that more capital is not going to speed up the AGI timeline right now, but even that is a soft signal.
2) I think we already have AGI for any reasonable definitions of the terms 'artificial' 'general' and 'intelligence'. To wit: I can ask Gemini 2.5 a question about basically anything, and it will respond more coherently and more accurately than the vast majority of the human population, about a vast array of subjects.
I do not understand what else AGI could mean.
(In case it matters, I am also an AI researcher, I know many AI researchers, and many-but-not-all agree with me)
I asked Gemini to read a clock for me with hands on 10 and 2 and it got the long hand and the short hand backwards, probably because of the massive trove of online documentation about the symmetry of 10 after 10 being aesthetically pleasing for PR materials and icons or some such nonsense unrelated to the question or the clock.
I don't know about you, but I learned how to read an analog clock in kindergarten and Gemini got it wrong.
Sorry, so what? A few different ways to respond to this:
1) Please do me a favor and take the GPQA benchmark. I'm curious to see how you would do. Now go find the nearest kindergartner and ask them to take it. Curious to see how they would do. Maybe random 'ha gotcha!' tasks are not good measures of intelligence?
2) Depending on how you want to measure, the average human is ingesting somewhere between 10 and 100 mb per second. By the time you were in kindergarten (5yo) you would have ingested, conservatively, nearly 2 petabytes of highly multimodal data. Meanwhile, you are comparing against a system that has to understand everything it knows about the world from text (to a first approximation).
3) It seems very strange that reading a clock is a measure of intelligence at all. Unless you think large parts of GenZ are simply not generally intelligent
re "agree with"; You sound like a moron. How much $ are AI researchers who have dedicated their life to it gonna make by shorting AI? If you can't even solve this much then you don't have well-rounded intelligence. let alone be an AI researcher.
Also, do you even know what General mean? Gemini can't even tell me what time the library is open today, while even a 3y kid can. So much for "accurately".
If agi is coming, or even another ai as overwhelming as chatgpt is to its prior age, Then investing in all those companies is the Last thing to do. since they'd be leapfrogged by what's coming.
By investing in them one declares that there are no leapfrogs coming. Aka no agi, or even anything close to 10x chatgpt.
With that therefore, the battlefield shifts to being the best middleman. hence all those senseless amounts of money thrown around. For the masses will no longer need to personally seek out God Altman for their top oracling needs, and so someone can come between God and man, capture all value like microsoft did to ibm, and use it to compete building a new God (read: new scam). Rinse repeat.
1) the two decisions do not seem related to each other. OpenAI has capital to spend and is seeking distribution methods to shore up continued access to future capital. That strategic decision seems totally unrelated to their estimated timelines for when AGI (whatever definition you are using) will show up. Especially because they are in a race against other players. It may be a soft signal that more capital is not going to speed up the AGI timeline right now, but even that is a soft signal.
2) I think we already have AGI for any reasonable definitions of the terms 'artificial' 'general' and 'intelligence'. To wit: I can ask Gemini 2.5 a question about basically anything, and it will respond more coherently and more accurately than the vast majority of the human population, about a vast array of subjects.
I do not understand what else AGI could mean.
(In case it matters, I am also an AI researcher, I know many AI researchers, and many-but-not-all agree with me)