How Far Are We From Superintelligence?
Why the people raising money on superintelligence can't be the ones measuring it. Introducing Frontier Watch.
Somewhere between where the frontier labs stand today and the arrival of a reasoning, self-improving superintelligence sits a threshold called AGI — artificial general intelligence.
At the far end of that road is the superintelligence threshold, sometimes called the Singularity, where humanity meets either extinction or nirvana, depending on who you believe. AGI is the tipping point before it. So, you might think, predicting the Singularity is just a matter of predicting when a U.S. or Chinese lab builds a model that reaches AGI.
If only it were that easy.
The Forecast That Funds the Company
The assumption buried in every “AGI by [year]” headline is that the person saying it is making a forecast. A forecast is falsifiable. It names a definition you can check and a date you can hold against the calendar, and it costs the forecaster something to be wrong. Strip those properties out and what remains is a marketing claim in a forecast’s clothing. The fastest way to tell the two apart is to ask who profits when the date is believed.
In 2024, Masayoshi Son put artificial superintelligence at roughly ten years out and defined it as intelligence ten thousand times beyond a human’s. By June 2026 he had moved the date to about two years and explained the original number: he had set it long on purpose, because people get shocked. Over the same stretch, SoftBank circulated a pitch deck projecting a valuation roughly thirteen times its current market capitalization, with superintelligence as the engine. When the arrival date is a line in your own valuation model, the date is doing the work of marketing, not measurement.
Sam Altman moves the definition more than the date. In September 2024, superintelligence was “a few thousand days” out. By January 2025 he wrote that OpenAI knew how to build AGI “as we have traditionally understood it.” By late 2025 AGI would arrive sooner than most people expected and matter less than they feared, with the real prize pushed out to a later superintelligence. Late in 2025 the concrete target became an automated AI researcher by March 2028.
How Altman defines AGI depends upon who you are. OpenAI’s public definition is highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work, however a second definition, set against a profit threshold, lived inside its contract with Microsoft. Altman has been predicting different things with the same three letters, which makes both definitions useless.
Elon Musk keeps the definition roughly fixed and moves the date on a loop. He predicted AGI by 2025. When 2025 passed without it, he told an xAI all-hands the year was now 2026. xAI is reportedly raising twenty to thirty billion dollars a year, and the imminence of AGI is the undercarriage that the raise rides on.
There is a court record on this pattern. A 2022 investor suit over Musk’s self-driving timelines was dismissed in 2024, with the judge characterizing the statements as “corporate puffery” rather than actionable fraud. A court has already filed his timeline claims under promotion that no reasonable person should rely on. That assessment came from a party with nothing to sell, which is the only kind worth trusting here.
The Definition That Was a Dollar Figure
When OpenAI signed with Microsoft in 2019, the deal said Microsoft’s commercial license would end once OpenAI’s board declared that it had reached AGI. The contract did not pin the term to a capability anyone could test. It reportedly tied it to a profit threshold — by one account, the point at which OpenAI’s systems could generate one hundred billion dollars in profits. AGI, in the document that governed the money, was a dollar amount.
That arrangement created an incentive worth stating plainly. A broad reading of AGI would let the board end Microsoft’s license and detonate OpenAI’s most important revenue relationship, so the structure rewarded keeping the definition narrow. The definition was shaped by money, in writing, and the direction of the pressure was documented in the contract itself.
Then the term became inconvenient. In October 2025, during OpenAI’s recapitalization as a public benefit corporation, the parties softened the trigger so the board could no longer declare AGI on its own, and added an independent verification panel. Microsoft converted its stake at a valuation near $135 billion. In April 2026 they removed the AGI provision altogether and decoupled it from payments. OpenAI’s models showed up on AWS the following day. With the clause gone, OpenAI may never have to announce whether it reaches the milestone at all.
A term that could be written, narrowed, and then deleted as the finances required was never a measurement of anything. It was a negotiating position.
On April 5, 2026, Marc Andreessen completely jumped the shark by announcing that AGI was already here. If the milestone can be declared in the past tense, in passing, by an investor with a position in the outcome, then the word has lost all meaning.
Not Everyone Is Selling
The point is not that every timeline is dishonest. Some forecasters offer a falsifiable estimate against a stated definition and hold it steady. Shane Legg at Google DeepMind has put roughly even odds on a minimal form of AGI by 2028 and kept that framing for years, uncertainty included. Demis Hassabis points to capabilities current systems still lack and puts genuine human-level AGI five to ten years out, resisting the claim that it has already arrived. Dario Amodei at Anthropic has been more aggressive, naming 2026 to 2027, though his estimates have stayed reasonably consistent, and Anthropic has publicly argued for the option to slow frontier development rather than only to accelerate it — though it softened that commitment in early 2026 under competitive pressure, a reminder that even the better posture bends when the money pushes.
The line worth drawing runs between people making a checkable estimate and people deploying a word that moves with their financing. The first group can be wrong. The second cannot even be tested.
What Frontier Watch Does
Frontier Watch begins with a refusal: the people who profit from the forecast should not be the ones who issue it.
It is published by Q16 PBC, a public benefit corporation. Q16 has no frontier model and no funding round riding on the timeline. It is paid by its readers, not by the labs it measures, so it gains nothing from any particular date being believed.
The measure is the Singularity Index: one number, on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0, where 1.0 is the superintelligence threshold and the score is the share of the distance already closed. It is not a capability rating and not a mood. It is an estimate of how far the field has actually come.
The estimate does not come from a lab. It comes from a pool of independent, qualified experts who each score the global frontier on their own — no shared stage to play to, no house position to defend. Frontier Watch reports the median and the spread, so you see both where they agree and where they split. No individual score is ever published, and no reading goes public until at least ten experts have submitted one. The Index moves when an elicitation wave completes, not when a funding round needs a headline. The first full wave is being assembled now; the current reading is preliminary, and qualified experts are invited to take part.
Between waves, Frontier Watch watches the labs the way you would watch anyone with this much money and this little oversight. It tracks the research that will move the next reading. And it monitors what the labs do rather than what they say: when a privacy policy changes, when terms shift, when the handling of your data quietly moves in their favor, it shows up in the dashboard, in plain language, with the reasoning attached.
The baseline reading is free, because the public should be able to see where the frontier stands without paying for the privilege. Members get the full analysis underneath it.
None of this makes the experts right. They can miss, and the spread is there so you can size the doubt yourself. But they are not selling you the answer, and that is the one property absent from every “AGI by [year]” headline above. A checkable estimate, made by people with no reason to move it. That is the offer.
The labs will keep announcing. That is their job. Keeping score from outside the arena is ours.
Sources:
By section
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The Forecast That Funds the Company
Masayoshi Son — ~10 years out, “10,000× human” (2024)
- CNBC, Jun 21 2024 — https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/21/softbank-ceo-predicts-ai-that-is-10000-times-smarter-than-humans-.html
- Fortune, Jun 27 2024 — https://fortune.com/2024/06/27/softbank-ceo-masayoshi-son-born-to-create-artificial-super-intelligence/
**Son — moved to ~2 years, “set it long on purpose” (June 2026)**
- CNBC, Jun 5 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/06/05/softbank-masayoshi-son-openai-model-super-intelligence.html
**SoftBank pitch deck — valuation ~13× current market cap**
- TBPN Digest, Jun 26 2026 — https://www.tbpndigest.com/story/2026-06-26/softbanks-asi-pitch-deck-masa-sons-quadrillion-yen-vision-and-the-golden-goose-theory-of-value
Sam Altman — “a few thousand days” (Sep 2024)
- Primary: Sam Altman, “The Intelligence Age” — https://ia.samaltman.com/
- Fortune, Sep 24 2024 — https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/sam-altman-ai-superintelligence/
**Altman — “we know how to build AGI” (Jan 2025)**
- Primary: Sam Altman, “Reflections” — https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections
- Forbes, Jan 6 2025 — https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/01/06/openai-ceo-sam-altman-we-know-how-to-build-agi/
Altman — AGI “sooner and matters less,” prize pushed to superintelligence (late 2025)
- TIME — https://time.com/7205596/sam-altman-superintelligence-agi/ *(opens in browser; blocks automated checks)*
Altman — automated AI researcher by March 2028
- TechCrunch, Oct 28 2025 — https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/28/sam-altman-says-openai-will-have-a-legitimate-ai-researcher-by-2028/
**OpenAI’s public AGI definition (”highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”)**
- OpenAI Charter — https://openai.com/charter/ *(opens in browser; blocks automated checks)*
Elon Musk — AGI by 2025, then moved to 2026
- Gizmodo — https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-predicts-agi-by-2026-he-predicted-agi-by-2025-last-year-2000701007
- Morocco World News, Dec 2025 — https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/12/272676/
xAI — raising ~$20–30B
- CNBC, Jan 6 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/06/elon-musk-xai-raises-20-billion-from-nvidia-cisco-investors.html
Tesla self-driving suit (filed 2022, dismissed 2024 as “corporate puffery”)
- Detroit News, Sep 30 2024 — https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2024/09/30/tesla-defeats-investor-lawsuit-over-musks-autopilot-marketing/75456295007/
- Washington Times, Oct 1 2024 — https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/oct/1/judge-dismisses-self-driving-lawsuit-against-tesla/
Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek) — pledged to pursue AGI to investors during a ~$10B (¥70B) round, ~$45B pre-money valuation (May 2026)
*Note: framed as research-over-commercialization, not a profit-driven or dated forecast — included as “AGI invoked to raise capital,” a different mechanism than the moving date/definition cases above.*
- Bloomberg, May 21 2026 (Lulu Yilun Chen & Haze Fan) — “DeepSeek Founder Avows AGI Goal Ahead of $10 Billion Funding” *(add URL from your Bloomberg link)*
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The Definition That Was a Dollar Figure
2019 Microsoft deal — license ends when the board declares AGI
- Spyglass — https://spyglass.org/the-openai-microsoft-agi-clause/
The $100B-profit threshold definition
- TechCrunch, Dec 26 2024 — https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/
Oct 2025 recapitalization — PBC, softened AGI trigger, verification panel, Microsoft ~27% stake at ~$135B
- CNBC, Oct 28 2025 — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft.html
- Al Jazeera, Oct 28 2025 — https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/10/28/openai-restructures-into-public-benefit-firm-microsoft-takes-27-stake
April 2026 — AGI provision removed, decoupled from payments; models on AWS the next day
- Simon Willison, Apr 27 2026 — https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/now-deceased-agi-clause/
- Axios, Apr 28 2026 — https://www.axios.com/2026/04/28/openai-microsoft-cloud-amazon
Marc Andreessen — “AGI already happened, ~3 months ago”
- TechRadar — https://www.techradar.com/pro/we-crossed-that-about-3-months-ago-a16zs-marc-andreessen-drops-huge-bombshell-about-agi-on-joe-rogans-podcast
- Cybernews — https://cybernews.com/ai-news/marc-andreessen-agi/
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Not Everyone Is Selling
Shane Legg (Google DeepMind) — ~even odds on minimal AGI by 2028, held for years
- The Decoder — https://the-decoder.com/deepmind-co-founder-shane-legg-sees-50-percent-chance-of-minimal-agi-by-2028/
- Dwarkesh Patel interview — https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/shane-legg
Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) — human-level AGI 5–10 years out
- CNBC, Mar 17 2025 — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/human-level-ai-will-be-here-in-5-to-10-years-deepmind-ceo-says.html
Dario Amodei (Anthropic) — 2026–2027 estimate
- Dwarkesh Patel interview — https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2
Anthropic — argued for the option to slow frontier development (Responsible Scaling Policy)
- Anthropic, UK AI Safety Summit — https://www.anthropic.com/news/uk-ai-safety-summit
Anthropic — softened that commitment in early 2026 under competitive pressure
- CNN, Feb 25 2026 — https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/tech/anthropic-safety-policy-change