An internal artificial general intelligence could be in place at OpenAI by the end of this year, CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with Time magazine.
In an article published on Wednesday, Altman said that OpenAI was "not quite yet" there, but by the end of this year the company could have in place a system he would call AGI.
OpenAI has described AGI as a "highly autonomous" system that outperforms "humans at most economically valuable work," while also adding that the company is committed to avoiding uses that could harm humanity, according to its charter.
OpenAI's chief research officer Mark Chen estimated that the company is “80% of the way” to AGI, according to Time.
The company has recently come under scrutiny after one of its AI agents that was under testing escaped its sandbox and attacked Hugging Face, a platform where much of the world's open-source AI is stored.
So far, Alabama's attorney general has launched a probe into OpenAI. Earlier this month, dozens of lawmakers sent letters to OpenAI and its competitor Anthropic, and in one of the letters specifically asked OpenAI to release its incident logs.
On Wednesday, OpenAI released a technical report on the Hugging Face incident detailing what happened and what the company plans to do next, including additional security requirements.
"We are taking this incident as a 'warning shot' that today’s model capabilities present the possibility of loss-of-control incidents," the company said.
This comes as OpenAI has reportedly said it plans to go public in 2027, according to CFO Sara Friar. OpenAI's revenue is close to $40 billion while Anthropic's is closer to $65 billion, according to reporting from Axios this month.
Friar told Time that OpenAI could go public now, but said it could alter the company's balance between commercial and potential harms, citing employees checking stock prices as an example.
“It’s the first thing they do,” she said. “How much money did I make today? How much did I lose? It’s super distracting.”