This photo illustration shows the ChatGPT logo at an office in Washington, DC, on March 15, 2023.
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We are still some way off reaching human-level artificial intelligence despite rapid advances in the technology, according to an early investor in research laboratory DeepMind.
“In terms of artificial general intelligence, OpenAI, ChatGPT stuff: it’s like saying we’re going to jump to the moon,” Humayun Sheikh, a founding investor in AI startup DeepMind, which is now owned by Google, told CNBC in an interview.
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“We took a big jump, but we’re not at the moon yet.”
Sheikh, who held around 1.3% of DeepMind’s shares in 2011, said that large language models (LLM) like those developed by Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI, though impressive, are lightyears away from so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
AGI is often referred to as the holy grail of AI. It is a hypothetical system capable of completing any task to the same level as a human.
This is very much: Google is not born yet, but Yahoo is.
Humayun Sheikh
CEO, Fetch.ai
“That’s really how I compare AGI with all the large language model companies which are popping up,” Humayun, who is now co-founder of AI and blockchain startup Fetch.ai, said.
“They are very limited. How you actually get them to do certain things is still in its infancy.”
“This is very much: Google is not born yet, but Yahoo is,” he added.
His comments come as Google-parent Alphabet merges DeepMind with Google Brain, part of the U.S. internet giant’s research division.
Google is racing to compete with Microsoft and other tech companies in the field of AI. Microsoft is making huge strides with its investment into OpenAI and the inclusion of the firm’s LLM technology into its Bing browser and other products.
Earlier this week, Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, told the Wall Street Journal that some form of AGI might be possible “in the next few years.”
Sheikh said he had a “lot of respect” for Hassabis and that the entrepreneur is “very aware of the ethics of AI.”
“One of the first things he has been always bringing out was, how do we control it? How do we put that boundary around it and make sure AI doesn’t go out of control?,” Sheikh said.
Google acquired DeepMind for $500 million in 2014 and is attempting to bolster its business by doubling down on AI in a bid to fend off the threat to its core search unit from OpenAI. Google launched its own chatbot alternative to ChatGPT, Bard, in March.
AI’s huge potential is seen in its ability to generate entirely new content from user prompts. People have used the technology to create everything from poems to quirky images and movie trailers, while kids are using it to help with their homework.
Experts have raised concern over the risks of sophisticated AI, however, with a group of tech leaders including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak calling for a six-month ban on the development of AI more advanced than GPT-4, the latest version of OpenAI’s massive language processing software.
Demonstrators hold a banner reading “Liberated Zone” during a protest at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on Aug. 19, 2025. Microsoft Corp. employees rallied at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters in an effort to ratchet up pressure on the software maker to stop doing business with Israel over its war in Gaza.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A Microsoft engineer is resigning after 13 years at the software giant, claiming the company continues to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and that executives won’t discuss the war in Gaza.
Scott Sutfin-Glowski, a principal software engineer, informed colleagues at Microsoft on Thursday that this will be his last week at the company.
“I can no longer accept enabling what may be the worst atrocities of our time,” he wrote.
In the letter, he referred to a February Associated Press article that said the Israeli military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and he claimed the vast majority of them remain active.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Sutfin-Glowski’s announced departure comes a day after President Donald Trump said Israel and Hamas committed to the first phase of a peace plan two years into the latest conflict. The AP reported on Thursday, citing government officials, that the U.S. is sending roughly 200 troops to Israel to help support the ceasefire deal.
The conflict has been a matter of ongoing tension at Microsoft.
For months, employees have protested the company’s cloud business from the Israeli military. Five employees were fired.
In September, Microsoft said it had stopped providing certain services to a division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, though it didn’t provide specifics. That decision came after Microsoft investigated an August report from The Guardian saying the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200 had built a system for tracking Palestinians’ phone calls.
Sutfin-Glowski said the company cut off communication systems that allowed employees to bring up their concerns regarding the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft products.
Outside a building at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Thursday, employees and community members opened up banners calling on the company to drop ties with Israel, according to a statement from No Azure for Apartheid. The group has been asking Microsoft to listen to the more than 1,500 employees who petitioned the company to endorse a ceasefire.
“Today, the ceasefire in Gaza finally takes effect after two years of genocide, but the atrocities, human rights abuses, war crimes, apartheid, and occupation continue,” Sutfin-Glowski wrote.
Tesla is facing a federal investigation into possible safety defects with FSD, its partially automated driving system that is also known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
Media, vehicle owner and other incident reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that in 44 separate incidents, Tesla drivers using FSD said the system caused them to run a red light, steer into oncoming traffic or commit other traffic safety violations leading to collisions, including some that injured people.
In a notice posted to the agency’s website on Thursday, NHTSA said the investigation concerns “all Tesla vehicles that have been equipped with FSD (Supervised) or FSD (Beta),” which is an estimated 2,882,566 of the company’s electric cars.
Tesla cars, even with FSD engaged, require a human driver ready to brake or steer at any time.
The NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation opened a Preliminary Evaluation to “assess whether there was prior warning or adequate time for the driver to respond to the unexpected behavior” by Tesla’s FSD, or “to safely supervise the automated driving task,” among other things.
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The ODI’s review will also assess “warnings to the driver about the system’s impending behavior; the time given to drivers to respond; the capability of FSD to detect, display to the driver, and respond appropriately to traffic signals; and the capability of FSD to detect and respond to lane markings and wrong-way signage.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the new federal probe. The company released an updated version of FSD this week, version 14.1, to customers.
For years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised investors that Tesla would someday be able to turn their existing electric vehicles into robotaxis, capable of generating income for owners while they sleep or go on vacation, with a simple software update.
That hasn’t happened yet, and Tesla has since informed owners that future upgrades will require new hardware as well as software releases.
Tesla is testing a Robotaxi-brand ride-hailing service in Texas and elsewhere, but it includes human safety drivers or valets on board who either conduct the drives or manually intervene as needed.
In February this year, Musk and President Donald Trump slashed NHTSA staff as part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce, impacting the agency’s ability to investigate vehicle safety and regulate autonomous vehicles, The Washington Post first reported.
Commander Jared Isaacman of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, speaks at a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. August 19, 2024.
Isaacman, who has close ties with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, was at the White House in September for Trump’s dinner for tech power players. Musk did not attend.
Trump and Isaacman have had multiple in-person meetings in recent weeks to talk about the Shift4 founder’s vision for the space program, according to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the meetings.
After a fiery back-and-forth between Musk and Trump over government spending, the president pulled Isaacman’s nomination for the post, saying he was a “blue blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before.”
“I also thought it inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on June 6.
Trump named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy interim head of NASA in July.
Isaacman, who declined to comment, was initially nominated in December to lead the space agency.
Isaacman is a seasoned space traveller, having led two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024. Shift4 has invested $27.5 million in SpaceX, according to a 2021 filing.
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Isaacman stepped down as CEO from Shift4, the payments company he founded in 1999 at the age of 16, after his nomination was pulled, and now serves as executive chairman.
“Even knowing the outcome, I would do it all over again,” Isaacman wrote about the NASA nomination process in a letter to investors announcing the Shift4 change.
Now, it looks like he gets to do it all over again.
Tensions between Musk and Trump have cooled in the months since, but big challenges face the U.S. space program..
Trump has proposed cutting more than $6 billion from NASA’s budget.
As a result of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which Musk led in the first half of 2025, around 4,000 NASA employees took deferred resignation program offers, cutting the space agency’s staff of 18,000 by about one-fifth.
During the October government shutdown, NASA has made exceptions that allow employees to keep working on missions involving Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.