Sam Altman predicts AGI by 2025

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

The race to AGI just got a deadline, and it's a lot sooner than anyone expected.

OpenAI's Sam Altman is now betting on 2025 for the big milestone — but will rumors of scaling challenges force him to eat his words? Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

• Altman predicts AGI in 2025

• The Beatles make AI history with Grammy noms

• Extract insights from any technical PDF

• MIT's AI trains robot dogs in virtual worlds

• 5 new AI tools & 5 new AI jobs

• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

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LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

📈 Altman predicts AGI in 2025

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just predicted that artificial general intelligence will be achieved in 2025, coming alongside conflicting reports of slowing progress in LLM development and scaling across the industry.

The details:

• In an interview with YC founder Gary Tan, Altman said the path to AGI is ‘basically clear’ and will require engineering, not new scientific breakthroughs.

• A new report revealed that the rumored ‘Orion’ model shows smaller improvement over GPT-4 than previous generations, especially in coding tasks.

• The company also reportedly formed a new "Foundations Team" to tackle fundamental challenges, such as the scarcity of high-quality training data.

• OpenAI researchers Noam Brown and Clive Chan backed Altman’s AGI confidence, believing the o1 reasoning model offers new scaling capabilities.

Why it matters: Altman’s prediction would mean a drastic leap in the company’s AGI scale (currently level 2 of 5) — but the CEO has remained consistent in his confidence. With OpenAI suddenly prioritizing o1 development, it makes sense that the reasoning model might have shown new potential to break through any scaling limits.

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• Personalize sleep temperature: Adjust each side from 55°F to 110°F.

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• Let AI enhance your sleep: The Pod learns your patterns to automatically adjust temperatures throughout the night.

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MUSIC & AI

🎵 The Beatles make AI history with Grammy noms

The Rundown: "Now and Then," The Beatles' AI-enhanced final song, released a year ago, just became the first AI-assisted track to receive Grammy nominations — marking a historical moment for AI's role in music production.

The details:

• The song earned nominations for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance, competing against artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

• The track used AI "stem separation" technology to clean up and isolate John Lennon's vocals from a 1978 unreleased demo.

• The AI technique mirrors noise-canceling technology used in video calls, training models to identify and separate specific sounds.

• The nomination follows the Grammy’s 2023 denial of consideration to viral AI creator Ghostwriter due to the unauthorized use of vocals.

Why it matters: The Beatles have been pioneers throughout music history, so it’s only fitting that they help carry the baton into this new era of AI-assisted production and creation. The coming wave of song generation will be an even bigger shift, but this technique shows how artists can also use AI as a tool for preservation and restoration.

AI TRAINING

🎯 Extract insights from any technical PDF

The Rundown: Claude’s new visual document feature lets AI analyze and understand complex PDFs containing charts, diagrams, and graphics, transforming how we extract information from technical documents.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to Claude AI and enable "Visual PDFs" in your Feature Preview settings.

2. Upload your PDF containing charts, diagrams, or technical illustrations.

3. Ask specific questions about visual elements (e.g., "Explain the relationship shown in this diagram").

4. Combine visual analysis with text queries for comprehensive insights.

Pro tip: Frame your questions to specifically reference visual elements. This helps you get more precise and detailed answers about charts and diagrams.

PRESENTED BY SECTION SCHOOL

🧠 Free session: How Salesforce’s CEO thinks about AI ROI

The Rundown: Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff is sitting down with Scott Galloway at Section’s free virtual conference on Nov. 14 to talk about his three big AI investments.

Marc is joined by AI leaders at Moderna, S&P Global, and ServiceNow to discuss:

• Practical insights and advice based on their own AI deployments

• Where they are (or aren’t) getting ROI from their AI investments

• How you can use AI to transform your own organization

Register for free to secure your spot.

AI RESEARCH

🐶 MIT's AI trains robot dogs in virtual worlds

The Rundown: MIT researchers unveiled an AI system called LucidSim that trains four-legged robots using generated imagery — achieving unprecedented real-world performance without ever seeing actual environments during training.

The details:

• LucidSim combines physics simulations with AI-generated scenes to create diverse training environments for robotic learning.

• Robots trained in LucidSim’s artificial environments completed complex tasks like obstacle navigation and ball chasing with up to 88% accuracy.

• The platform uses ChatGPT to auto-generate thousands of scene descriptions, creating varied training scenarios with different weather and lighting conditions.

• Traditional training methods relying solely on human demonstration achieved only 15% success rates on the same tasks.

Why it matters: A paradigm shift is underway in how advanced robots are trained. By eliminating the need for extensive real-world training data, systems like LucidSim could dramatically accelerate the development of more capable robots while also reducing the time and resources needed to deploy them in real-world settings.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

Trending AI Tools

• 🤳 Genbler - Photo and video AI SaaS solution for content creators

• ⚙️ AI App Generator - Build fully functional AI wrappers with backend API routes in seconds

• 💡 Diaflow - Be the hero of your company with powerful AI automation, apps, and internal workflows

• 👨‍💻 FlowScraper - Automate websites and extract data with no coding required

• 🧠 Maibrain - Preserve the voice and experiences of your loved ones so you can interact with them in the future

New AI Job Opportunities

• 🚀 The Rundown - Head of Growth

• ☁️ Lambda - Engineering Manager, Cloud

• 🛠️ Coreweave - Principal Engineer

• 📊 Meta - Quality Data Analyst

• 🎨 Grammarly - Principal Product Designer

QUICK HITS

AI music generation startup Suno showcased new demos of its soon-to-be-released v4 model, with enhanced audio samples demonstrating improved naturalness and consistency.

The U.S. Commerce Department ordered chipmaker TSMC to halt the export of advanced chips for AI applications to Chinese customers starting this week.

Chinese tech giant Baidu will reportedly unveil AI-powered smart glasses equipped with voice and camera capabilities at its upcoming Baidu World event, positioning the product as a competitor to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses at a lower price point.

A federal judge dismissed a Raw Story and AlterNet copyright lawsuit against OpenAI over AI training data, expressing skepticism about the news outlets' ability to prove harm.

The Washington Post launched "Ask The Post AI," a new generative AI search tool that taps into the publication's archives to provide direct answers and curated results to reader queries.

OpenAI VP of Research and Safety Lillian Weng announced she is departing the company after seven years, marking another significant exit from the startup’s leadership.

xAI launched a free tier of its Grok chatbot in select regions, offering limited access to Grok 2, Grok 2 mini, and image analysis capabilities.

THAT’S A WRAP

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, and Alvaro—aka The Rundown Team