Sam Altman now says AGI, or human-level AI, is ‘not a super useful term’ — and he’s not alone
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said artificial general intelligence, or “AGI,” is losing its relevance as a term as rapid advances in the space make it harder to define the concept.
AGI refers to the concept of a form of artificial intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that a human can. For years, OpenAI has been working to research and develop AGI that is safe and benefits all humanity.
“I think it’s not a super useful term,” Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week, when asked whether the company’s latest GPT-5 model moves the world any closer to achieving AGI. The AI entrepreneur has previously said he thinks AGI could be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future.”
The problem with AGI, Altman said, is that there are multiple definitions being used by different companies and individuals. One definition is an AI that can do “a significant amount of the work in the world,” according to Altman — however, that has its issues because the nature of work is constantly changing.
“I think the point of all of this is it doesn’t really matter and it’s just this continuing exponential of model capability that we’ll rely on for more and more things,” Altman said.
Altman isn’t alone in raising skepticism about “AGI” and how people use the term.
Difficult to define
Nick Patience, vice president and AI practice lead at The Futurum Group, told CNBC that though AGI is a “fantastic North Star for inspiration,” on the whole it’s not a helpful term.
“It drives funding and captures the public imagination, but its vague, sci-fi definition often creates a fog of hype that obscures the real, tangible progress we’re making in more specialised AI,” he said via email.
OpenAI and other startups have raised billions of dollars and attained dizzyingly high valuations with the promise that they will eventually reach a form of AI powerful enough to be considered “AGI.” OpenAI was last valued by investors at $300 billion and it is said to be preparing a secondary share sale at a valuation of $500 billion.
Last week, the company released GPT-5, its latest large language model for all ChatGPT users. OpenAI said the new system is smarter, faster and “a lot more useful” — especially when it comes to writing, coding and providing assistance on health care queries.
But the launch led to criticisms from some online that the long-awaited model was an underwhelming upgrade, making only minor improvements on its predecessor.
“By all accounts it’s incremental, not revolutionary,” Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, told CNBC.
AI firms “should be forced to declare how they measure up to globally agreed metrics” when they launch new products, Hall added. “It’s the Wild West for snake oil salesmen at the moment.”
A distraction?
For his part, Altman has admitted OpenAI’s new model misses the mark of his own personal definition of AGI, as the system is not yet capable of continuously learning on its own.
While OpenAI still maintains artificial general intelligence as its ultimate goal, Altman has said it’s better to talk about levels of progress toward this state of general intelligence rather than asking if something is AGI or not.
“We try now to use these different levels … rather than the binary of, ‘is it AGI or is it not?’ I think that became too coarse as we get closer,” the OpenAI CEO said during a talk at the FinRegLab AI Symposium in November 2024.
Altman still expects AI to achieve some key breakthroughs in specific fields — such as new math theorems and scientific discoveries — in the next two years or so.
“There’s so much exciting real-world stuff happening, I feel AGI is a bit of a distraction, promoted by those that need to keep raising astonishing amounts of funding,” Futurum’s Patience told CNBC.
“It’s more useful to talk about specific capabilities than this nebulous concept of ‘general’ intelligence.”
Mike Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, speaks at the Nasdaq headquarters in New York on March 28, 2025.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
CoreWeave shares fell about 6% in extended trading on Tuesday even as the provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure beat estimates for second-quarter revenue
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: Loss of 21 cents
- Revenue: $1.21 billion vs. $1.08 billion expected
Revenue more than tripled from $395.4 million a year earlier, CoreWeave said in a statement. The company registered a $290.5 million net loss, compared with a $323 million loss in second quarter of 2024. CoreWeave’s earnings per share figure wasn’t immediately comparable with estimates from LSEG.
CoreWeave’s operating margin shrank to 2% from 20% a year ago due primarily to $145 million in stock-based compensation costs. This is CoreWeave’s second quarter of full financial results as a public company following its IPO in March.
CoreWeave pointed to an expansion in business with OpenAI, a major client and investor. Also during the quarter, CoreWeave acquired Weights and Biases, a startup with software for monitoring AI models, for $1.4 billion.
In May, management touted 420% revenue growth, alongside widening losses and nearly $9 billion in debt. The stock still doubled anyway over the course of the next month.
CoreWeave shares became available on Nasdaq at the end of the first quarter, after the company sold 37.5 shares at $40 each, yielding $1.5 billion in proceeds. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was trading at $148.75 for a market cap of over $72 billion.
A CoreWeave data center project with up to 250 megawatts of capacity is set to be delivered in 2026, the company said in the statement.
Executives will discuss the results and issue guidance on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
WATCH: Citi’s Tyler Radke’s bullish call on CoreWeave, upgraded to buy
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) invites Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to speak in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on “Investing in America” on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
The Trump administration is still working out the details of its 15% export tax on Nvidia and AMD and could bring deals of this kind to more companies, the White House’s Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
“Right now it stands with these two companies. Perhaps it could expand in the future to other companies,” said Leavitt, the White House’s spokesperson.
“The legality of it, the mechanics of it, is still being ironed out by the Department of Commerce, and I would defer you to them for any further details on how it will actually be implemented,” she continued.
President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he had negotiated a deal with Nvidia in which the U.S. government approves export licenses for the China-specific H20 AI chip in exchange for a 15% cut of revenue. Advanced Micro Devices also got licenses approved in exchange for a proportion of its China sales, the White House confirmed.
“I said, ‘If I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I’m giving you a release,'” Trump said Monday.
“We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets,” Nvidia said in a statement this week.
Trump said the export licenses for AMD and Nvidia were a done deal. But lawyers and experts who follow trade have warned that Trump’s deal may be complicated because of existing laws that regulate how the government can charge fees for export licenses.
The Commerce Department didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The H20 is Nvidia’s Chinese-specific chip that is slowed down on purpose to comply with U.S. export relations. It’s related to the H100 and H200 chips that are used in the U.S., and was introduced after the Biden administration implemented export controls on artificial intelligence chips in 2023.
Earlier this year, Nvidia said that it was on track to sell more than $8 billion worth of H20 chips in a single quarter before the Trump administration in April said that it would require a license to export the chip.
Trump signaled in July that he was likely to approve export licenses for the chip after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited the White House.
The U.S. regulates AI chips like those made by Nvidia for national security reasons, saying that they could be used by the Chinese government to leapfrog U.S. capabilities in AI, or they could be used by the Chinese military or linked groups.
The Chinese government has been encouraging local companies in recent weeks to avoid using Nvidia’s H20 chips for any government or national security-related work, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
WATCH: Access to Nvidia’s H20 won’t hand China an AI advantage: Analyst
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