The AI leaders bringing the AGI debate down to Earth

During a recent dinner with business leaders in San Francisco, a comment I made cast a chill over the room. I hadn’t asked my dining companions anything I considered to be extremely faux pas: simply whether they thought today’s AI could someday achieve human-like intelligence (i.e. AGI) or beyond. It’s a more controversial topic than you might think. In 2025, there’s no shortage of tech CEOs offering the bull case for how large language models (LLMs), which power chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, could attain human-level or even super-human intelligence over the near term. These executives argue that highly capable AI will bring about widespread — and widely distributed — societal benefits. For example, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, wrote in an essay that exceptionally powerful AI could arrive as soon as 2026 and be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields.” Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently claimed his company knows how to build “superintelligent” AI, ... Read full article.