Jensen Huang Says Nvidia Achieved AGI But Dismisses the Milestone as 'Senseless'

Jensen Huang says Nvidia achieved AGI, again -- not that it matters

On Nvidia's earnings call Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang casually announced the company had "achieved AGI," one of the tech industry's ultimate goals some of its biggest players have spent years chasing. Almost immediately, Huang dismissed the coveted milestone as "senseless." He's right. For the supposed finish line of the AI race, there is no consensus on what artificial general intelligence means, let alone how we'll know when we've actually got there, which makes achieving it equally arbitrary. Asked about OpenAI's pursuit of AGI, Huang said that when it comes to Nvidia, "for many tasks, we could say that we've already achieved AGI." He did not provide a precise definition or benchmark, but added, "I think of all of those milestones and all those, you know, they're kind of senseless at this point." He also pointed to AI moving beyond responding to simple prompts to autonomous agents capable of learning new skills and improving themselves "recursively." What really matters, Huang said, is that AI is "doing productive and useful work" and "generating profitable tokens," with more compute producing more tokens -- and, inevitably, more profit. "This is the exact phase where we're at. Which is the reason why everybody's leaning in." This isn't the first time Huang has said we've reached AGI. In March, during an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast, he plainly stated, "I think we've achieved AGI." Huang didn't say exactly what he meant by AGI. Fridman proposed his own oddly specific definition: an AI system that's able to "essentially do your job," as in start, grow, and run a successful tech company worth more than $1 billion. Walking back his earlier claims, Huang said that "the odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia is zero percent." Over the years, other tech leaders have capitalized on the term's fuzziness and produced a veritable grab bag of definitions and benchmarks, all orbiting the same nebulous concept: AI capable of matching or surpassing human intelligence across a broad range of domains, despite the fact that "intelligence" also doesn't have a universally agreed-upon definition. The definition of AGI according to OpenAI - a company founded with the explicit goal of building it - leaves a lot of room for interpretation. In its charter, OpenAI defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." Altman himself has acknowledged that this is hardly a measurable standard, admitting last year that AGI is "not a super useful term." Complicating matters is OpenAI's different, financially-driven definition of AGI it worked out with Microsoft -- reportedly systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. In a recent Time story, chief research officer Mark Chen estimated OpenAI is "80% of the way" to AGI, while Altman said that by the end of the year the company would have something he would call AGI. The fact that both AGI and its threshold remain undefined is no secret: tech leaders say so themselves, even as they make predictions predicated on it. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called AGI "imprecise," even a "marketing term," preferring instead to talk about "powerful AI." Others have similarly reached for their own terms to describe broadly similar ideas. In theory, there are supposed to be distinctions between them, but in practice they all bleed together. Meta talks about "personal superintelligence," Microsoft "humanist superintelligence," and Amazon "useful general intelligence." Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis has taken to talking about how we've arrived at the "foothills of the singularity." And OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly led employees in chants of "feel the AGI," now runs a company called Safe Superintelligence. New terminology hasn't made the meaning more tangible. So long as AGI remains poorly defined and carelessly used, the whole thing is senseless. Well, unless you want a handy tool for hyping up progress. So expect the industry -- Huang included -- to keep the AGI talk coming. Maybe an AGI will eventually show up and tell us what AGI actually means.

Nvidia CEO: We've Achieved AGI, But It Doesn't Really Matter

AI capable of matching or surpassing human intelligence remains a major goal for the tech industry. But to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, this artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a milestone that's become irrelevant. "For many tasks, we could say that we have already achieved AGI. I think all of those milestones...are kind of senseless at this point," Huang said in an earnings call on Wednesday. In contrast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells Time in a new interview that his company will develop AGI internally by the end of this year. In OpenAI's case, the company defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." Huang didn't define AGI on the earnings call. But he said it's no longer people just prompting AI to execute tasks; more AI programs, called agents, can already run autonomously and improve "recursively," by running the task over and over again. "I think the most important thing that matters for the industry is that one, AI is doing productive and useful work," he said. "Two, AI is generating profitable tokens. And three, if we had more compute, we could generate more profitable tokens, which results in more profit for all of the services. This is the exact phase where we are at." The focus on productivity and profit might be in response to growing concern about an AI bubble amid unprecedented investment in AI data centers, even though the two leading players, OpenAI and Anthropic, still need to prove they're profitable. Other critics say large language models will never achieve AGI because they lack persistent memory, struggle to understand logic, and remain prone to hallucinating incorrect information. In the meantime, Nvidia is raking in huge profits, generating $96.2 billion in fiscal Q2, up a staggering 106% year-over-year. The company also indicated it could grow even more, if not for the AI-driven memory shortage. Nvidia expects the shortage to remain a bottleneck at least through the early part of 2028. "We are experiencing extreme pricing conditions in memory," Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said on the call. "The magnitude of the price increase has exceeded our prior expectations, and [it's] headed even higher into next year." That doesn't bode well for the company's graphics cards, which have already seen a recent price increase. As for Huang, he indicated on Lex Fridman's podcast earlier this year that the tech industry had already reached AGI to a certain extent. "I think it's now. I think we've achieved AGI," he said, pointing to how today's AI programs can create an app capable of going viral and attracting billions of users that later fizzles out. "Now, the odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia [are] zero percent," he added.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AGI is already here -- and the milestone is 'senseless'

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company has already achieved AGI but it doesn't matter. Credit: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images Some AI industry leaders, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are obsessed with artificial general intelligence, or AGI. While the term has no universally agreed-upon definition, it generally refers to AI that can match or even surpass human cognitive abilities across a large range of tasks. In a recent interview, Altman shared that OpenAI believes it will achieve AGI by the end of the year. However, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AI has, in some respects, already achieved AGI -- and it's really no big deal. Nvidia has become the darling of the tech industry in recent years. The company is an invaluable part of the AI industry because it produces many of the high-performance chips that power the technology. During an earnings call on Aug. 26, Huang was asked about AGI in light of OpenAI's recent claims. "For many tasks, we could say that we've already achieved AGI," Huang said. "I think of all of those milestones...they're kind of senseless at this point." Huang said the focus should be on whether AI is "doing productive and useful work." From a company perspective, Huang added that the concern should be about "generating profitable tokens." It's unclear exactly what Huang meant when saying Nvidia has already achieved AGI. He pointed to AI's evolution beyond simply responding to prompts, arguing that agents can now reflect on their performance, learn new skills, and improve their future output. This is not the first time the Nvidia CEO has claimed the company has achieved AGI. In a March 2026 interview, podcaster Lex Fridman asked whether an AI that could start, build, and run a billion-dollar company would be achievable within the next 20 years. "I think it's now. I think we've achieved AGI," Huang replied. However, Huang then qualified that claim, saying AI might be able to create a billion-dollar viral app but could not build a company like Nvidia. "The odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia," he added, "is zero percent."