Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has congratulated OpenAI following the debut of its latest frontier model, Astra, and declared that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has finally emerged. Taking to social media platform X, he celebrated ChatGPT-maker’s rapid technological progression while highlighting that Astra was developed using Nvidia’s advanced hardware. The term AGI refers to automated systems capable of equaling or exceeding human cognitive abilities across various domains. Huang also hinted that far more processing power is on the horizon, noting that 400,000 additional graphics processing units will soon go live to support continued AI model training and execution.“From ChatGPT to o1 to Astra in 4 years. AGI has arrived,” Huang posted on X, adding, “Congratulations @OpenAI team. 400K GPUs coming online next.”
OpenAI unveils Astra: ‘Welcome to the AGI Era’
OpenAI formally introduced Astra last week, promoting the architecture as its most capable and aligned system to date. According to the company, the model is engineered to handle complex professional responsibilities with precision, speed, and analytical reasoning, marking a major leap forward in what tasks organisations can safely offload to automation.During a press briefing, OpenAI president Greg Brockman framed the launch as a historic turning point. “Welcome to the AGI era,” Brockman told reporters, adding that he expects future observers will pinpoint this period, and potentially Astra itself, as the exact emergence of AGI.According to a report by Business Insider, despite the celebratory declarations from executive suites, several prominent figures in the AI sector urged caution and rejected the claims. Longtime AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus criticised Huang’s assertion as premature.Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently downplayed the significance of the acronym during an interview on the Sources podcast, calling AGI an ill-defined concept and describing it as an almost irrelevant marketing label.Meanwhile, Astra’s debut highlights the central role Nvidia plays across the AI sector, as leading development groups, including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta, remain heavily reliant on the company’s high-performance processors. During an investment update in March, OpenAI characterised Nvidia as the structural foundation of its computing operations, confirming that its primary training supercomputers and inference workflows depend heavily on Nvidia GPUs.