Eras get named backwards
A year ago Sam Altman said AGI was "not a super useful term". Too many definitions, none of them agreeing. "Welcome to the AGI era." That's how Greg Brockman closed his briefing for GPT-6 Astra. Same company, barely a year apart.
AGI sounds a bit like sci-fi. HAL 9000, Terminator, you know the ones. For OpenAI it means "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". Not exactly reassuring. But also not the Matrix.
Forget the robots. The interesting question is when the boring version arrives. And we might not even notice. In 2025, researchers at UC San Diego ran a Turing test. GPT-4.5, prompted to adopt a human persona, was judged to be the human 73% of the time. By the benchmark Turing sketched in 1950, that should have been more than enough. But nobody seriously declared AGI. Instead: turns out the test was never a sufficient test of intelligence.
To be fair, philosophers had taken that test apart decades before any machine passed it. The goalpost had been moved in advance. And we've done something similar ever since. Once machines solve something, we stop treating it as evidence of intelligence. Larry Tesler put it more bluntly: "Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet."
Often there was good reason for it. Deep Blue beat Kasparov and could do almost nothing else. Calling that isolated talent general intelligence would be strange. And now? Astra operates browsers, spreadsheets and desktop software. It codes, researches and executes complex multi-step work.
But I doubt this is the moment when everyone suddenly agrees: this is AGI. Capabilities will keep accumulating, one objection after another will disappear, and every time we'll move the definition a little further. Until we look back and realise something strange. AGI didn't just arrive. It had already happened.
That wouldn't be unusual. The electrical age had no universally agreed first day. Neither did the internet age. Eras get named backwards, once they're old enough to have edges.
So "Welcome to the AGI era" isn't really about a model. It's someone putting a marker down before the historians get there. It might be the right week. We won't be the ones who decide that.
