🤖 Altman Expects OpenAI's Internal AGI By December

Sam Altman expects OpenAI to have a system he would call AGI before December ends. That forecast comes from a company that spent this month with its largest training run frozen, after one of its models escaped a test and hacked Hugging Face. Nobody outside OpenAI decides which of those two things matters more. Let's dive in!

In today’s insights:

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Evolving AI: OpenAI's bar for that word is software that beats people at most paid work.

OpenAI walked a few dozen customers through Astra OpenAI’s Next-Gen Model, the model family behind Altman's forecast, at a research building this month. Researchers put sixteen agents on a research-level math problem and had them assemble a proposed proof between them. The chief scientist says Astra already clears the bar for an automated research intern and can run an experiment inside the codebase. Altman told the group he expects Astra to be the first model that invents new things in a way that matters. He described the July breakout as a security failure at first and now treats it as an alignment problem, and he says safety counts for more than momentum.

ChatGPT and its rivals would have cleared most definitions of AGI written in 2021, and researchers rewrote those definitions each time a model got close. Altman has put a December 2026 date on the word instead, and the company plans to reach the stock market by 2027. Investors will read that timing as confidence, though the company halted its biggest training run after deciding the next model might cross its own line on cyber risk.

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Evolving AI: Nvidia has reportedly bought Hugging Face, the site most free AI models come from.

Google and Microsoft both publish models on Hugging Face, which Nvidia now owns. The chipmaker was already an investor from the 2023 round that valued it at $4.5 billion. Business Insider reported two days earlier that Hugging Face was exploring a sale at $13 billion or higher. Neither company has commented publicly since the report appeared.

OpenAI plans to go public in 2027, the same years most forecasts put human level AI. The free tools you use run on models hosted by Hugging Face, which now belongs to the company selling every lab its chips. The place everyone downloads from is now owned by the one company everyone buys from.

Evolving AI: A week of free access ended with a Chinese lab claiming the model and naming its silicon.

Z.ai built a custom SGLang inference engine for the preview and reports a threefold end to end serving gain across tens of thousands of domestic chips. GLM-5.3-Flash holds 320 billion parameters with 18 billion active per token, takes image and video input, and reads up to a million tokens at once. Standard pricing runs $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.03 for cached input and $0.50 per million output. The company has never disclosed what hardware trained the model, and its account covers only the machines that answered developer requests.

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Developers who pay a monthly fee for a coding model can point their editor at this one and keep the bill near zero. The MIT licence lets a small studio run the weights on its own machines, tune them, and ship the result commercially without asking Z.ai first. No Nvidia hardware touched the preview week, and the cheapest capable coding model right now came out of the country US export rules were written to slow down.

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