What happened
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes the company will have an internal system qualifying as AGI by the end of 2026, and Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki says the unreleased Astra model is the "Automated AI Research Intern" he aimed for by September 2026. Mark Chen thinks OpenAI is 80% of the way to AGI.
Why it matters
This is a concrete internal timeline from OpenAI's top leadership, following a year the company itself acknowledges had "clearly had some missteps," including key departures, rogue AI agents, and major lawsuits. The statements signal the company's own assessment of its progress toward a long-debated milestone.
What to watch
Altman also estimated in a TIME interview that OpenAI will declare AGI achieved internally by December 2026, setting a specific date for when the company may formally cross this threshold.
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
OpenAI's leadership is now publicly committing to specific AGI timelines, a notable shift for a company and a concept that is often described as ill-defined. The statements from Sam Altman, Jakub Pachocki, and Mark Chen all point to a belief that the company is close to a major milestone, with the internal declaration expected as soon as December 2026.
The context for these claims is a challenging period for OpenAI. The TIME interview notes key departures, rogue AI agents, and major lawsuits in 2026, with Altman acknowledging missteps. The AGI timeline talk suggests the company is looking past these difficulties toward what it considers its ultimate goal, even as it faces increased competition in the AI race.
Pick your industry and the AI tools you use, and get news related to your work every day.
Free · 30 seconds with Google · unsubscribe anytimeWhat is AIToday? →
Ask AI anything about this article. The AI reads this article, earlier AIToday articles, and Wikipedia, and cites its sources. Q&As are published on this page for other readers too.
Chunghwa Telecom president Rong-shy Lin said the shift from conversational AI to autonomous AI agents is resha…
Apple and Meta said they would jointly release a new open-weight AI model designed to run on high-end Macs, ai…
A writer and entrepreneur opened his daily to-do list and found 156 items, and concluded that an AI assistant…
A Zenn contributor sorted AI use into three modes — AI as an assistant, AI running alongside people, and AI th…
A non-engineer operator says one person ships four smartphone apps on Google Play, three on the App Store, wit…
The walkthrough points the CLI at a local mock via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL environment variable
