OpenAI hails ‘new era of artificial general intelligence’ with Astra model release

The president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, has claimed the world has entered a new era of artificial general intelligence after the release of his company’s latest model, Astra, which it described as the “world’s most intelligent and aligned model”.

Brockman made the claim on Thursday as the San Francisco company released the model only weeks after a serious AI safety incident involving other models under its development caused international concern and a pause in Astra’s training.

Artificial general intelligence – or AGI – is a fuzzy threshold that has long been talked about as a target for the AI industry. It has been defined as an AI system’s ability to learn, reason and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks and domains at a human level or higher. OpenAI has defined it as “autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”.

Brockman said: “If we fast forward a couple years, and we look back and say when was it really that AGI was created,
I think it’s going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model.

“I think that we’re at a point now where these models are solving unsolved 100-year-old math problems, but you can also use them in order to accelerate the economy [and] in order to benefit you and your personal life … I think it’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.”