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Much like how 2024 ended in New York City, the 2025 AI news cycle has started off with a thunderclap.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman took to his personal blog yesterday (January 5) to belatedly commemorate the second anniversary of ChatGPT (which launched in November 2022) and offer a series of “Reflections” on progress toward OpenAI’s stated goal of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the company defines this as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans” — and later, superintellignence, AI systems even smarter than that.
Among the eye-popping statements Altman writes in his post are: “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”
Altman didn’t put a timeline on this particular development in his blog post, but in an interview published by Bloomberg yesterday (but conducted ahead of last month’s announcement of OpenAI’s o3 model last month) Altman said:
“I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term, and getting that right seems really important.”
Before we have AGI, AI agents will join the workforce this year, Altman says
Back to Altman’s blog, the CEO wrote: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.”
If I may read between the lines here, the idea is that companies could soon augment or even replace human members of their staff with AI agents — that is, autonomous or semi-autonomous AI-powered assistants that can complete multiple tasks with minimal human back-and-forth.
Superintelligence incoming?
But it is Altman’s concluding statements in his blog post that are perhaps the most bold and provocative. He writes:
“We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright — we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important. Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company.”
That very same day, OpenAI’s head of mission alignment Joshua Achiam posted on X: “The world isn’t grappling enough with the seriousness of AI and how it will upend or negate a lot of the assumptions many seemingly-robust equilibria are based upon.”
Achiam expounded further in a lengthy thread on X, suggesting the rapid pace of AI advancement will significantly alter “Domestic politics. International politics. Market efficiency. The rate of change of technological progress. Social graphs. The emotional dependency of people on other people,” and in another post, added that this “will force changes in strategy in businesses, institutions of all kinds, and countries.”
Prior to all these posts, on January 3rd, Stephen McAleer, a self-described researching safety agent at OpenAI, also posted on X: “I kinda miss doing AI research back when we didn’t know how to create superintelligence.”
Reactions across the board
The reaction around the web has been a fairly predictable mix of positive and negative, and appears to me to be mostly evenly split between those who embrace OpenAI’s optimistic and seemingly aggressive timeline for the advance of AI in society and those who believe the company is full of it.
As McKay Wrigley, founder of skills development platform Takeoff AI, wrote in a post on X: “AGI timelines are out. ASI timelines are in.”
Another X user, @gfodor, wrote an extremely optimistic prediction in a post: “By the end of Trump’s term we’ll have AGI if not ASI, we will be on Mars, we will have at least a million humanoid robots, we’ll know we are alone if aliens don’t show up, we’ll know if Yud was right, and we will have to have UBI. Fun”
UBI, of course, refers to “universal basic income,” an idea floated back in the late 1700s to offer minimum wages to all of the population. This has in recent years received backing from Silicon Valley figures, including Altman, as a means of leveraging AI’s productivity gains and ensuring that they don’t cause society to undergo economic depression or devastation if most jobs are replaced by AI.
Perennial OpenAI skeptic Gary Marcus took to X to post a thread of links to areas where he believes OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model is falling well short of what could be considered AGI or even close to it, stating: “Many leading figures in the field have acknowledged that we may have reached a period of diminishing returns of pure LLM scaling, much as I anticipated in 2022. It’s anybody’s guess what happens next.”
Benjamin Riley, a former JP Morgan associate who said he worked at the firm when infamous failed energy company Enron was a client, compared that firm to OpenAI on the social network BlueSky. In a series of posts he wrote, in part: “I mostly steer clear of OpenAI palace intrigue but man, all the signs are there.”
Seizing upon Altman’s prediction of AI agents joining the workforce this year, public relations manager and outspoken AI critic Ed Zitron also wrote on BlueSky: “Stop fucking printing everything Sam Altman says like it’s truth!”
We’ll soon find out if it is indeed the truth or not, as 2025 has scarcely just begun — and already, the AGI and superintelligence hype has hit a fever pitch unlike any I’ve seen in my 15 years writing about technology.
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