Artificial general intelligence is the big goal of OpenAI. What exactly that is, however, is still up for debate.

According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, systems like GPT-4 or GPT-5 would have passed for AGI to “a lot of people” ten years ago. “Now people are like, well, you know, it’s like a nice little chatbot or whatever,” Altman said.

The phenomenon Altman describes has a name: It’s called the “AI effect,” and computer scientist Larry Tesler summed it up by saying, “AI is anything that has not been done yet.”