ModelOp’s Chief Technology Officer, Jim Olsen, was recently featured in a Digital Trends article exploring the future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
In the article, Olsen shares insights into where the industry stands on the path to AGI and what might drive the next big breakthrough. According to Olsen, today’s AI models—like those built on large language models (LLMs)—are powerful but still far from true general intelligence. What separates AGI, he says, is the ability for a model to operate in truly novel situations.
“A model given a novel situation can rapidly and correctly identify or figure out the course of action or come up with new content on something it literally has not seen before,” Olsen explains.
He notes that the recent AI revolution sparked by ChatGPT was powered by labeled data and GPU advances—but AGI will require something more.
“Somebody could have a stroke of lightning genius and come up with some technique that blows the timeline,” Olsen said. “If I were betting, it’s going to be further down the line as we refine the capabilities of what we’ve learned about LLMs.”
Olsen also points to emerging approaches like distillation—highlighted recently by Chinese AI company DeepSeek—as potential stepping stones toward AGI. He suggests that, just as small language models (SLMs) can now be fine-tuned and run locally, a similar approach could emerge for AGI.
“I could potentially see a distillation style technique coming to AGI where we lose some abilities, but maybe we gain the intelligence we specifically need for that task,” he said.
Still, Olsen emphasizes the importance of human oversight, especially as these systems grow more capable.
“The reality is, I would hope there would be checks and balances in any kind of system,” he noted. “Where AI is interesting, but I wouldn’t let it run free in my company.”
You can read the full article on Digital Trends.
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