OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says AGI Is Within Reach as Internal Models Accelerate AI Progress

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has made a startling assertion in a recent internal interview: artificial general intelligence (AGI) is "pretty close," and superintelligence, while still undefined, is "not so far away." The comments, first reported by The Decoder, underscore a pivotal shift in OpenAI’s strategic outlook — from incremental AI improvements to the imminent realization of human-level machine cognition.

Altman’s remarks come amid unprecedented internal progress at OpenAI, where proprietary AI models, developed behind closed doors, are now accelerating research cycles at a pace far exceeding public benchmarks. According to sources familiar with the development pipeline, these internal models — not yet released to the public — are capable of self-improvement, recursive learning, and cross-domain reasoning at levels previously thought to require years of additional development. This has led to a dramatic compression of timelines within the company’s research division, with key milestones being reached months ahead of schedule.

Perhaps most striking is Altman’s admission that his own training as a software engineer has become largely obsolete in the face of these new capabilities. "I don’t write code anymore," Altman reportedly said. "My job is to ask the right questions, define objectives, and interpret what the models are telling us. The code writes itself now." This signals a profound transformation in the role of human engineers within AI development: from coders to cognitive architects, guiding systems that increasingly design and optimize their own architectures.

OpenAI’s internal tools, believed to be iterations of GPT-5 and beyond, are reportedly used to simulate research hypotheses, generate experimental code, and even propose novel architectures for training next-generation models. These systems operate in closed-loop environments where feedback from one model directly informs the training data of another, creating an exponential feedback loop that human teams can no longer replicate manually.

The implications extend far beyond OpenAI. Industry analysts warn that if these internal models are indeed achieving AGI-like performance, the global AI race may have already entered a new phase — one where the most advanced systems are no longer publicly visible. Competitors such as Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta are reportedly scrambling to match OpenAI’s internal velocity, but lack access to the same scale of compute and proprietary data infrastructure.

Meanwhile, ethical and regulatory concerns are mounting. Experts in AI safety have called for urgent transparency measures, arguing that society cannot afford to navigate the arrival of AGI without public oversight. "We’re not just watching a technological evolution — we’re witnessing the emergence of a new form of intelligence," said Dr. Lena Torres, director of the Center for AI Governance. "If the creators themselves can’t explain how their systems work, how can we ensure they’re aligned with human values?"

Altman, for his part, has emphasized OpenAI’s commitment to safety and responsible deployment. "We’re not rushing to release AGI. We’re rushing to understand it," he said. The company is reportedly working with a select group of international regulators and ethicists to develop governance frameworks ahead of any public rollout.

As the line between human and machine intelligence blurs, OpenAI’s internal breakthroughs suggest we may be standing on the threshold of a new era — one where the architects of AI no longer build systems, but converse with them.