'It's missing something': AGI, superintelligence and a race for the future

That was how Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, described the latest upgrade to ChatGPT this week. The race Altman was referring to was artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical state of AI where, by OpenAI's definition, a highly autonomous system is able to do a human's job. Describing the new GPT-5 model, which will power ChatGPT, as a "significant step on the path to AGI", he nonetheless added a hefty caveat. "[It is] missing something quite important, many things quite important," said Altman, such as the model's inability to "continuously learn" even after its launch. In other words, these systems are impressive but they have yet to crack the autonomy that would allow them to do a full-time job.