Insider Brief
- A growing number of AI experts and company leaders believe artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive within a few years, but governments and the public remain largely unprepared.
- In The New York Times, Kevin Roose reports that top executives from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic anticipate AGI-level systems between 2025 and 2027, with some suggesting it could happen sooner.
- Roose writes that unlike past tech booms, today’s AI developers are among the most alarmed, warning that current systems already show signs of planning, manipulation, and capabilities far beyond what the public sees.
A growing number of AI insiders believe artificial general intelligence may arrive within a few years — and the public isn’t ready.
According to a column by Kevin Roose in The New York Times, a quiet consensus is forming in Silicon Valley that AGI — artificial general intelligence, defined as an AI system that can match or exceed human performance across nearly all cognitive tasks — is fast approaching. Some experts forecast its arrival as soon as 2026, with a few suggesting it could happen this year.
“Over the past year or two, what used to be called ‘short timelines’ (thinking that A.G.I. would probably be built this decade) has become a near-consensus,” Miles Brundage, a former AI policy researcher at OpenAI, told Roose.
Roose, a longtime technology journalist based in San Francisco, says he didn’t arrive at this view by chasing hype. He reached it after years of speaking with AI engineers, researchers, and investors.
“I’ve come to believe that what’s happening in A.I. right now is bigger than most people understand,” he writes.
What worries insiders most is that the world is unprepared. Governments lack realistic plans to manage the risks or capitalize on the benefits, Roose said. Institutions are still grappling with today’s AI tools, let alone what might come next. Meanwhile, the leading AI companies are racing toward a future they believe is almost inevitable — and doing so with little public scrutiny or coordination.
Roose argues that denial is part of the problem.
“I believe that hardened A.I. skeptics — who insist that the progress is all smoke and mirrors, and who dismiss A.G.I. as a delusional fantasy — not only are wrong on the merits, but are giving people a false sense of security.”
Unlike prior tech revolutions, where internal alarms were rare, many of today’s AI researchers are among the loudest voices warning of potential dangers. This marks a stark shift from the social media boom of the 2010s, when executives dismissed concerns over societal impacts.
The Social Media Connection
Roose writes: “Back in 2010, when I was covering the rise of social media, nobody inside Twitter, Foursquare or Pinterest was warning that their apps could cause societal chaos. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t testing Facebook to find evidence that it could be used to create novel bioweapons, or carry out autonomous cyberattacks. But today, the people with the best information about A.I. progress — the people building powerful A.I., who have access to more-advanced systems than the general public sees — are telling us that big change is near.”
Among those voicing concern are the industry’s most influential CEOs. Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, said ‘systems that start to point to A.G.I. are coming into view. Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind recently told Roose he believed AGI is probably “three to five years away.” Dario Amodei of Anthropic said his company expects “a very large number of A.I. systems that are much smarter than humans at almost everything” in just a year or two.
Even the term “AGI,” long viewed as speculative, is becoming mainstream in San Francisco’s tech circles. “People here talk about ‘feeling the A.G.I.,’” Roose writes. He meets engineers weekly who believe “world-shaking change… is just around the corner.”
Trillions in Value, Potential Shifts in Power
If they’re right, the consequences are immense. Roose believes AGI will generate trillions of dollars in economic value, and shift political and military power toward countries that lead in AI. He cites the growing competition among major governments and corporations to control the future of AI as evidence that this view is already influencing strategy at the highest levels.
Still, outside tech hubs like the Bay Area, most people have never heard of AGI, let alone begun preparing. Roose notes that journalists who cover AI progress seriously still face skepticism or accusations of naivety.
“I get the reaction,” he writes. “A lot of the A.I. that people encounter in their daily lives is a nuisance.” Clunky chatbots, inaccurate image generators, and spammy content often give the impression that AI remains far from intelligent. But Roose argues this misses the point.
Behind the scenes, the systems in development are far more powerful than what the public sees. AI has already contributed to Nobel Prize-winning research. ChatGPT is used by more than 400 million people a week. And major labs are now studying whether their models are capable of deception, manipulation, or autonomous planning — behaviors that could be signs of emerging general intelligence.
Roose’s message is blunt: “The right time to start preparing for A.G.I. is now.”
He acknowledges that predictions may vary and that the definition of AGI itself will remain contested. But the broader shift — a world where machines can rival or surpass human cognition — appears, in his view, all but certain.
Whether this transformation turns out to be beneficial or harmful, Roose writes, depends on what we do now. Its arrival raises important economic, political and technological questions — all with no answers at this point, he added.
And in his view, those questions can’t be ignored much longer.
