OpenAI comes up with five levels to track its progress toward AGI: Chatbots, Reasoners, Agents, Innovators, and Organizations, and says it's nearly at Level 2

The company believes its technology is approaching the second level of five on the path to artificial general intelligence

Bloomberg 2024-07-12 Rachel Metz

Context & Ripple Effects

OpenAI had already framed ChatGPT and GPT-4 as steps toward AGI in a longer AGI-building strategy, while DeepMind researchers had separately proposed their own five-level taxonomy for describing progress. OpenAI’s framework makes that race legible through product- and capability-oriented stages rather than a single, disputed AGI threshold.

The Level 2 claim also lands alongside reports that OpenAI was preparing capabilities with stronger logical reasoning and multimodal understanding. It turns an internal ambition into a public benchmark against which subsequent model releases can be judged.

First-order effects

OpenAI gains a concrete vocabulary for positioning current and future models: near-“Reasoner” rather than merely a chatbot, without claiming AGI has arrived.
Customers, developers, and investors get a stated capability milestone to use when interpreting OpenAI’s product claims and road map.

Second-order effects

Rival labs face added pressure to define comparable progress measures or explain why their models should be evaluated differently; DeepMind’s earlier five-level AGI taxonomy provides one competing reference point.
The framing raises the value of evaluations that distinguish reliable reasoning from fluent conversation, since OpenAI’s claimed advance depends on that distinction being credible.

Third-order effects

If major labs standardize staged AGI narratives, competition may shift from headline model launches toward contested benchmarks, safety evidence, and proof that systems can operate beyond chat interfaces.
Public milestone-setting can also intensify scrutiny of governance commitments: OpenAI had previously described precautions for a successful AGI outcome, making capability claims inseparable from questions about how increasingly autonomous systems are controlled.

The trend: AI labs are replacing the binary question of whether AGI exists with staged capability frameworks that shape product positioning, evaluation, and governance debates.

Discussion

@shiringhaffary Shirin Ghaffary on x
OpenAI has come up w/ a framework of 5 levels to track progress twd AGI, and think they're currently near level 2 ("Reasoners") At recent all-hands, leadership also did a research demo of GPT4 w/ improved reasoning by @rachelmetz w/ an assist from me https://www.bloomberg.com/...…
@rachelmetz Rachel Metz on x
SCOOP: OpenAI has come up with 5 levels to track its progress toward its goal of building AI that can do things that only humans can currently do. at an all-hands meeting this week, company execs told employees they believe they're nearing level 2. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
@grady_booch Grady Booch on x
The next three levels are just a simple matter of programming.
@shaunralston Shaun Ralston on x
@OpenAI is at Level 1 towards #AGI, nearing Level 2; just three more to go! Nice reporting @rachelmetz https://www.bloomberg.com/...
@mrjonfinger Jon Finger on x
These “levels” seem to be pretty substantially disproportionate. 3,4, and 5 seem like they could all pretty plausibly happen with whatever major release comes after 2.
@parmy Parmy Olson on x
OpenAI says it's at level 2 of 5 on the path to building AGI. That seems... low? Having spent much of the past 1.5 years fuelling AI hype, this is a clear shift towards better managing expect expectations. See also Mira Murati's interview saying GPT-5 might not come till late
@humanharlan Harlan Stewart on x
We all love categorizing things into neat boxes, it's probably in our DNA as a species. Sometimes I worry that making classification systems like this might distract from the fact that we don't know how to confidently predict when AI will have dangerous capabilities.
r/artificial r on reddit
OpenAI just told employees at an all-hands meeting they're “on the cusp” of models capable of “problem-solving tasks as well as a human with a doctorate-level education.”
r/singularity r on reddit
Per Bloomberg, OpenAI at an employee meeting on Tuesday “gave a demonstration of a research project involving its GPT-4 AI model that OpenAI thinks shows …

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