Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Made a Bold AGI Proclamation, But Other Tech Leaders Aren’t So Sure

The Nvidia leader’s recent comments grabbed headlines, but some in the industry are more cautious.

BY KEVIN HAYNES, NEWS WRITER

A fun, theoretical question about the prospects of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) someday starting, growing, and running a company to a $1 billion valuation drew a startling response from Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang on Monday.

“I think it’s now,” he told the host of the Lex Fridman podcast. “I think we’ve achieved AGI.”

Huang Says It’s Theoretically Possible Already

An artificial intelligence agent like open-source OpenClaw, Huang noted, could hypothetically create a viral web service that billions of people would use briefly, making it possible to hit the $1 billion goal before folding, just like many companies did during the dot-com era.

That said, Huang quickly subjected the theoretical to reality. “The odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia is zero percent,” he said.

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Huang’s thoughts on AGI’s “procedural” power and potential have shifted over the past few years. In late 2023, he predicted it would take no more than five years for AGI to pass any human test in, say, the medical or legal professions. Now, he says, AGI is already there, but only in the sense that it can focus on specific high-value output as opposed to achieving the ominous science-fiction goal of actually “being” human.

Other Tech Leaders Are Less Confident

No one else in Big Tech seems to be pushing the AGI envelope quite as far as Huang.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said he foresees “near-term” AGI, with strict guardrails that ensure safety as these systems grow more powerful. “I don’t think there’s going to be a light-switch moment where one day we have nothing and the next day we have AGI” doing things that only humans could previously do, he said on The Ezra Klein Show in 2024. “It’s a continuous exponential curve,” rather than a sudden leap.

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