Back in 2018, OpenAI published a charter, which includes a self-sacrifice clause:
We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”
Interestingly, this is still hosted at https://openai.com/charter/, meaning it remains the official company policy.
At the same time, explicitly stated AGI timelines by Sam Altman are the following:
Date Predicted AGI Year Diff (years) Quote / Claim Source May 22, 2023 ~2033 ~10 “Within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains” OpenAI Blog — Governance of Superintelligence Dec 2023 ~2030 ~6 “By the time the end of this decade rolls around, the world will be in an unbelievably better place” TIME Nov 4, 2024 ~2029 ~5 “I think in 5 years […] people are like, man, the AGI moment came and went” 20VC Podcast Nov 8, 2024 2025 ~1 “What are you excited about in 2025? - AGI” Futurism Jan 2025 ~2029 ~4 “AGI will probably get developed during Trump’s term” Bloomberg Sep 25, 2025 2030 ~4 “By 2030, if we don’t have extraordinarily capable models that do things we can’t, I’d be very surprised” TechSpot Oct 28, 2025 2028 ~2 “Automated AI research intern by Sep 2026, full AI researcher by Mar 2028” OfficeChai Dec 18, 2025 2025 0 “AGI kinda went whooshing by… okay fine, we built AGIs” Windows Central Feb 3, 2026 2025 ~-1 “We basically have built AGI” (later: “a spiritual statement, not a literal one”) ALM Corp
We can see that the timeline of AGI (let’s assume this is the timeline for a better-than-even chance) has accelerated and the median prediction since 2025 is around 2 years. Notably, in the latest interviews it’s claimed that AGI has been achieved, and we’re now racing towards ASI.
Finally, here’s a snapshot of the current overall Arena ranking of top 10 models.
Model Overall Expert Hard Prompts Coding Math Creative Writing Instruction Following Longer Query claude-opus-4-6 1 1 2 2 3 4 2 2 claude-opus-4-6-thinking 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 gemini-3.1-pro-preview 3 3 3 3 1 5 3 3 grok-4.20-beta1 4 14 4 5 20 2 8 12 gemini-3-pro 5 7 5 9 5 3 9 5 gpt-5.4-high 6 4 10 11 8 6 5 11 gpt-5.2-chat-latest 7 10 7 6 4 9 10 15 gemini-3-flash 8 9 9 18 7 8 13 13 grok-4.1-thinking 9 17 13 19 21 19 28 27 claude-opus-4-5-202… 10 6 6 4 13 7 4 4
Based on these, the flagship GPT-5.4 model is clearly trailing behind competition. At least Anthropic’s and Google’s models are clearly safety-conscious, and probably value-aligned (whatever that means, but since the models are drop-in replacements to GPT, it should hold).
It can be debated whether arena.ai is a suitable metric for AGI, a strong case can probably be made for why it’s not. However, that’s irrelevant, as the spirit of the self-sacrifice clause is to avoid an arms race, and we are clearly in one.
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