Are we actually close to cracking AGI, or is that only a fantasy world that tech enthusiasts continue to expend billions into? Jensen Huang has an opinion.
NVIDIA’s CEO believes that they have “sort of” achieved AGI. You know, the tech dream- Artificial General Intelligence, AI that is on par with the human brain.
The claim.
It’s quite a recent but bold claim that Huang’s making. On the Lex Fridman Podcast, he states, “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI,” in response to whether AI will finally come to match or surpass human-level intelligence.
Note: To offer readers context, Fridman frames AGI as an AI system capable of building and running a billion-dollar company.
However, what’s surprising isn’t the topic of AGI.
The “backtracking.”
It’s that Huang didn’t wait long before walking his claim back in the same conversation. He highlighted that Fridman was talking about running a $1 billion company, but he didn’t specify for how long. And with that, NVIDIA’s CEO elaborates that it’s not out of the question that someday Claude could create a web service or interesting app that a few billion people use briefly for $0.50 before it goes out of business.
He further comments, “A lot of people use it for a couple of months, and it kind of dies away,” saying the odds of AI agents “building NVIDIA is 0%.”
That sounds less like a backtrack and more like a sleight of hand. Because if AI can spin up, go through this entire cycle, and end up producing $1 billion in revenue even once? That reframes AGI, not as a durable future, but as a short-term commercial flash.
And that’s not what the tech leaders or investors thought AGI was ever about.
The market opinion and critics.
The opinions on AI aren’t in sync with the direction of the actual spending on AI infrastructure. Could it be that building a narrative around ‘imminent’ AGI will help justify all the ‘enthusiastic’ resource allocation? Well, all that depends on how you define imminent.
But all of this is also part of a well-known industry pattern. Huang called it a commercial flash; Altman says they’re very close to it, while Nadella disagrees that we could even imagine what AGI would be like at this point in time.
In short, Huang definitely agrees with Fridman’s narrow, commercially defined benchmark for AGI.
Maybe the chip leader realized mid-conversation that the current AI can’t sustain the kind of complex, stable institution that NVIDIA represents. So, how can we even assume we’re close to achieving AGI?
