Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is "years, if not decades away" according to Yann LeCun [source], requiring "new scientific breakthroughs that we don’t know of yet". Taken from one of the leading researchers in AI, I think this should be enough of a reason to believe AGI is not around the corner.
Another evidence in that direction, is Sam Altman's latest Manifesto - The Intelligence Age - where he phrases it as AGI will be here after "possibly few thousand days, or longer".
Sam Altman, among all people, and OpenAI in general, have a very strong incentive to bring AGI as soon as possible on the stage. In fact, it seems achieving AGI is the main strategy pursued by OpenAI's founders [source]. Even though, OpenAI doesn't seem to have a roadmap to follow [source], its entire charter revolves around AGI. This seems like a page taken from Elon Musk's SpaceX, whose mission statement is about "making humanity multiplanetary". Only in OpenAI's case, there are many companies that are head-to-head with it and didn't require the AGI narrative to develop.
Altman is pivoting OpenAI from research lab to a "classical scale-up", as the company has losses of US$5bln this year (for US$3.7bln of revenue). The pivot from non-profit to profit structure will be clear only after the dust settles. For the moment, Microsoft detains 49% of the for-profit arm of OpenAI [source], Microsoft "have all the IP rights and all the capability" to continue operating its CoPilot "even if OpenAI dissapears". There is this "fun" clause, which takes away all this IP from Microsoft ONCE OpenAI hits the AGI status. Which is not anytime soon. If anything, it would incentivize Microsoft to start hindering OpenAI the moment they suspect AGI is close to becoming a reality.
OpenAI is raising $6.5bln, with $1bln coming from Microsoft, $0.1bln from NVidia, $0bln from Apple (who withdrew), and $1.2bln from Thrive Capital [source]. Getting Thrive Capital's investment required a sweetener - the right to invest $1bln more at the same conditions if certain revenue goals are met.
It is surprising for the hottest company in the world, leading on the hottest topic in the world to have to sweeten its investment deals... every time.
Alexander