Lucas Adcock
Staff Writer
The field of artificial intelligence, as an official academic discipline, began in 1956. At first, the goal was to mimic human problem-solving skills and to prove mathematical theorems, which was successful.
Then in 1966, the first chatbot came out. It was the first of its kind to simulate human conversation through natural language processing. After OpenAI released the first ChatGPT model in 2022, AI development exploded, each model helping to push coders and developers even further. Now, humanity is the closest it has ever been to artificial general intelligence (AGI.)
The AI research and safety company, Anthropic, released at the beginning of January 2026 a tool called “Cowork.” This is the first agentic AI tool of its kind, allowing the user to have AI run autonomously in the background of their workstation. Whether its organizing and filing documents on your desktop, or creating self-working agents that literally make you money while you sleep, Cowork is changing the way we think about work, money and the economy.
There are already leading experts in the field of artifical intelligence who are showing growing concerns – and for some, praise – that some AI models are now considered AGI. And while it seems that those with opinions that favor concern over AGI may be over-stated in some instances, are we really that far from AGI? If we truly haven’t reached it yet, we can’t be far off.
Two months ago, a well-established podcaster by the name of Lex Fridman, interviewed NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who proudly proclaimed that he believes AGI is already here.
When Huang spoke, he explained that the arrival of AGI depends on what its accepted definition is. Fridman agreed, reciting a broadly-accepted, loose definition that says: “AGI is an AI system that is able to do your job.”
Now, for example, this would be AGI building a company worth more than a billion dollars, according to Fridman. Is this even possible? After Fridman questioned the timeline of arrival for AGI, Huang declared, “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI.”
And the conversation went like this: “You think you could have a company run by an AI system like this?” Fridman questioned.
“Possible,”Huang replied. “And the reason for that is because… you said ‘billion’ and you didn’t say ‘forever,’ for example,” he continued. “It is not out of the question that a claw was able to create a web service, some intersting little app, that all of a sudden a few billion people used for 50 cents. And then it went out of business again shortly after. Now, we saw a whole bunch of those types of companies during the internet era, but those websites were not anything more sophisticated than what OpenClaw can generate today.”
“Achieve virality, and monetize that virality,” Fridman affirmed.
“But I couldn’t have predicted any of those companies at the time either,” Huang admitted.
“You’re going to get a lot of people excited about that statement,” Fridman chuckled, although it wasn’t meant as a joke.
Huang said it’s happening now with AI agents. But the odds of one hundred thousand of those agents building NVIDIA’s? “Zero percent,” he said.
This is what Huang finished with. It was an innocent-enough statement, but how far away are we really from AI becoming integrated into robotics? Building both software and hardware systems? Right now, humanity is at the turning point of when artificial intelligence can reasonably take over mundane tasks with relative ease. When AGI – meaning the lackluster, agree-upon definition of AGI – becomes actively prevalent, and when users begin to understand agentic AI on a more fundamental level, perhaps its role in society will shift to something that is accepted on a broader scale for positive use.
Or, perhaps AGI is only a tool that artificial super intelligence will use to arise. When we reach a collective understanding that we have achieved ASI, the world will shift, unable to be changed. Not if, but when, that point arrives, what’s the limit?
What happens next in this new age of humanity?
