On a Monday episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a hot-button statement: “I think we’ve achieved AGI.”
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a vaguely defined term that has incited a lot of discussion by tech CEOs, tech workers, and the general public in recent years, as it typically denotes AI that’s equal to or surpasses human intelligence. In recent months, tech leaders have tried to distance themselves from the term and create their own terminology that they view as less over-hyped, more useful, and more clearly defined (although the new phrases they’ve come up with essentially mean the same thing as AGI). The term has also been the subject of key clauses in big-ticket contracts between companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, upon which a significant amount of money may hinge.
Fridman, the podcast’s host, defines AGI as an AI system that’s able to “essentially do your job,” as in start, grow, and run a successful tech company worth more than $1 billion. He then asks Huang when he believes AGI will be real — asking if it’s, say, five, 10, 15, or 20 years away — and Huang responds, “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI.”
Fridman says, “You’re gonna get a lot of people excited with that statement.” Huang goes on to mention OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent platform, and its viral success. He said that people are using their individual AI agents to do all sorts of things, and that he “wouldn’t be surprised if some social thing happened or somebody created a digital influencer … or some social application that, you know, feeds your little Tamagotchi or something like that, and it become out of the blue an instant success.”
But Huang then seemed to slightly walk back his earlier claims, saying, “A lot of people use it for a couple of months and it kind of dies away. Now, the odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia is zero percent.”