By Chance Townsend
Publication Date: 2026-03-23 21:00:00
Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, has spent the last year or so as the AI industry’s favorite buzzword. As the sector’s leading companies burn through capital at historic rates, racking up energy costs and investor expectations that grow harder to meet by the quarter, the promise of imminent human-level machine intelligence has become a useful thing to have in your back pocket.
Whether we’re actually close to that milestone depends almost entirely on how you define it. That definitional flexibility, it turns out, is doing a lot of work.
Take, for example, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA — a company currently valued at roughly $4 trillion, built largely on the GPU hardware that powers the AI boom — who recently sat down with podcaster Lex Fridman for a wide-ranging conversation covering data centers, geopolitics, and the question of whether AGI has already arrived. Huang thinks it has. The reasoning behind that claim, however, is fairly dubious.
As Fridman points out, Huang has previously said the timeline for AGI depends on what defines it. At the 2023 New York Times DealBook Summit, Huang defined AGI as software capable of passing tests that approximate normal human intelligence at a reasonably competitive level. He expected AI to clear that bar within five years.
For his part, Fridman offered Huang a generous definition to work with: true AGI, in Fridman’s framing, would look like an AI capable of…