Few would argue that AI progress over the past few years has not been rapid. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) have provided an unexpected path to increasingly general capabilities. In 2019, OpenAI’s GPT-2 struggled to write a coherent paragraph. In 2025, LLMs write fluent essays, outcompete human experts at graduate-level science questions, and excel at competition mathematics and coding. The most advanced multi-modal AI models now produce images and video that are hard to distinguish from reality. 

These models are impressive (and useful!) but they still fall short of the north star that frontier AI companies are working towards. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which OpenAI describes as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work” has been the ultimate ambition of AI researchers for many decades. 

Most experts agree that AGI is possible. They also agree that it will have transformative consequences. There is less consensus about what these consequences will be. Some believe AGI will usher in an age of radical abundance. Others believe it will likely lead to human extinction. One thing we can be sure of is that a post-AGI world would look very different to the one we live in today. 

So, is AGI just around the corner? Or are there still hard problems in front of us that will take decades to crack, despite the speed of recent progress? This is a subject of live debate. Ask various groups when they think AGI will arrive and you’ll get very different answers, ranging from just a couple of years to more than two decades. 

Why is this? We’ve tried to pin down some core disagreements.  — Read More