> multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away"
I'd like to see an example of this.
I think Altman and Amodei have been quite sober with their actual predictions. They've said things like "models can now do white collar work" but haven't yet said it is the end of white collar work.
The closest actual quote to this was in In March 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a Council on Foreign Relations audience that AI would be writing 90 percent of code in three to six months, and essentially all of it within twelve months.
I think that he underestimated how long it takes for technology to get uptake but in terms of capabilities he was perhaps 6 months out. I'd say that Fable class models are definitely capable of writing essentially all software, and that was released June 2026.
You could try checking the news.
> In a remarkable interview with Y Combinator in November 2024, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared a vision that could redefine the technological landscape as we know it. Altman confidently revealed that OpenAI has a clear roadmap for achieving AGI by 2025.
https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-i...
Now Altman is claiming it'll be this year for sure: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/sam-altman-makes-bold-a...
What specifically was he wrong about in either of those? I.e, something that can be falsified.
> Altman claimed that AGI could be achieved in 2025 during an interview for Y Combinator, declaring that it is now simply an engineering problem. He said things were moving faster than expected and that the path to AGI was "basically clear."
"AGI" isn't a useful term because - as noted in the article you linked - people disagree about what it means. Also his actual claim here seems to have been that the path to AGI was "basically clear."
That isn't a prediction that can be falsified.
Whoa, be careful, I think those goalposts just broke the speed of sound.
> Altman claimed that AGI could be achieved in 2025 during an interview for Y Combinator, declaring that it is now simply an engineering problem. He said things were moving faster than expected and that the path to AGI was "basically clear."
He was wrong that AGI was "now simply an engineering problem".
He was wrong that the path to AGI was "basically clear".
And if you want to play definition games and start waving your hands around and accept the claim "oh well actually we don't really know how to define AGI now", then he was wrong to claim that the path to AGI was "basically clear"!
Even if you play that game, it's still simple: either he was wrong about the path being clear, or he was wrong about the destination being clearly definable. That's still being wrong.
> He was wrong that AGI was "now simply an engineering problem".
> He was wrong that the path to AGI was "basically clear".
Why do you say that?
For context, Jensen Huang says:
> "For many tasks, we could say that we’ve already achieved AGI... I think of all of those milestones…they’re kind of senseless at this point.[1]
Even if you disagree with that, Altman's statement seems more about the idea that "more data + more compute + transformer based neural networks" will get us to something called AGI.
I think that statement is true. I guess you don't.
> if you want to play definition games and start waving your hands around and accept the claim "oh well actually we don't really know how to define AGI now", then he was wrong to claim that the path to AGI was "basically clear"!
No - because I think his and Jenson's definition means we have achieved AGI.
So it goes back to my point: this isn't falsifiable.
[1] https://mashable.com/tech/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-agi-a...
> Why do you say that?
Because he was wrong. That's how it works.
> For context, Jensen Huang says:
>> "For many tasks, we could say that we’ve already achieved AGI... I think of all of those milestones…they’re kind of senseless at this point.[1]
This statement is nonsense. It's Artificial General Intelligence that was promised. Not Artificial Some Things Intelligence.
> Even if you disagree with that, Altman's statement seems more about the idea that "more data + more compute + transformer based neural networks" will get us to something called AGI.
His statement was wrong. I don't care what other ideas you want to read into it, he was incorrect about AGI arriving in 2025. That's all there is to it. Twist it into a knot and smear butter on it if you want, wrong is wrong.
> No - because I think his and Jenson's definition means we have achieved AGI
Yeah they can twist definitions all they want. I don't really care. We have seen that LLMs and transformers have not delivered AGI, and they certainly didn't deliver it in 2025.
> Because he was wrong. That's how it works.
> His statement was wrong. I don't care what other ideas you want to read into it, he was incorrect about AGI arriving in 2025.
No
Sam Altman never claimed we'd get AGI in 2025. That is Tom's Hardware incorrect headline.
Altman's quote is:
"I felt like we actually know what to do like I think from here to building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work there are some known unknowns but I think we basically know what to go what to go do and it'll take a while it'll be hard but that's tremendously exciting I also think on the product side there's more to figure out but roughly we know what to shoot at and what we want to optimize for that's a really exciting time.."
See here: https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w?t=2327
It's not Altman's fault that people misreported him.
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All in all, it's clearly the AI skeptics that have egg on their faces. Sam Altman is very flawed and you could make a strong argument for why that's why he blew an enormous lead to Anthropic. Dario's predictions in general haven't been that far off. The general public is becoming increasingly aware of AI as a big deal (and something about 60% hates). Our jobs, regardless of where on the adoption curve we are, have undeniably changed a lot.
Zitron and a whole lot of people on HN were trying to claim this was a nothingburger or at least no more important than the invention of IDEs up until Dec 2025, and then all of a sudden everyone quietly shifted what the "reasonable" opinion was. If I were those people, I'd spend more time taking a look at what was wrong with my priors than look outward.
Note that no one ever quotes the end of Dario's line, either, where he said programmers would still be needed in that 12 months. People think the prediction was more extreme than it really was because all the clips didn't include the latter part.
> .... and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing; What is the overall app you're trying to make; What is the overall design decision; How we collaborate with other code that has been written; How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced