Jensen Huang announced that the AGI era has arrived. OpenAI’s latest flagship model, Astra, was trained on approximately 100,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72 chips, with 400,000 additional GPUs set to launch soon. OpenAI positions Astra as “the most intelligent and most human-aligned model in the world,” with President Brockman declaring, “Welcome to the AGI era.” However, AI researcher Gary Marcus criticized Huang for moving too quickly, noting that the definition of AGI remains disputed. As a core supplier of AI infrastructure, NVIDIA reported quarterly data center revenue of $89 billion, more than doubling year-over-year.Article author and source: Wall Street Journal
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the official beginning of the era of artificial general intelligence, attributing this historic milestone to OpenAI’s latest flagship model, Astra—which was trained on NVIDIA chips. This statement once again positions NVIDIA as the dominant force in AI infrastructure and suggests that even larger-scale compute expansion is on the horizon.
On Sunday, Huang Renxun posted on X to congratulate the OpenAI team, stating that "AGI has arrived," and revealed that Astra was trained on over 100,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72 chips. He also indicated that "400K GPUs are coming soon," sending a strong signal that NVIDIA's computing power supply will further surge.
This statement has direct implications for the market. NVIDIA’s data center business has become its core growth engine, and Jensen Huang’s forecast of adding 400,000 GPUs indicates that demand from top AI customers continues to expand.
Astra Launch: OpenAI Calls It the "Smartest" Model
OpenAI released Astra last Thursday, positioning it as "the world's most intelligent and human-aligned model," claiming it can "perform the most demanding professional tasks at an unparalleled speed, precision, and judgment." At the launch event, OpenAI President Greg Brockman told the media: "Welcome to the age of AGI."
Brockman further predicted that, in the future, people looking back at history will believe AGI emerged “around this time, and I think it might be this model.” “Personally, I do believe we’ve reached it,” he said. Astra is beginning its rollout to users this week.
OpenAI defines AGI as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work," and positions Astra as a major research breakthrough that marks a fundamental shift in the boundaries of tasks that can be entrusted to AI.
Controversy persists: There is still no consensus on the definition of AGI.
However, not everyone agrees with this announcement. Renowned AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus directly stated that Jensen Huang is moving too fast.
“Huang did not provide evidence or a definition; to me, this seems like an attempt to impose corporate will on a scientific issue,” Marcus wrote on his Substack. “Declaring victory without a definition only makes the issue more confusing.”
Marcus then listed his own 10 criteria for AGI, noting that Astra meets only one or two of them. "By standard definitions, Astra still falls short," he said.
Even OpenAI’s own CEO, Sam Altman, has taken a cautious stance on this concept. He recently said on the “Sources” podcast that AGI is, at best, “a term with an extremely vague definition. I was going to say it’s more like an irrelevant marketing term.”
NVIDIA: The Core Foundation of AI Infrastructure
Regardless of how the debate over AGI's definition unfolds, NVIDIA's position as the core computing supplier for leading AI companies is unquestioned. In a funding announcement this March, OpenAI referred to NVIDIA as "the foundation of our infrastructure" and stated that "our training clusters and most of our inference stack continue to run on NVIDIA GPUs."
Frontier AI companies such as Meta, Anthropic, and Google also heavily rely on high-end chips produced by NVIDIA. This demand has translated into strong financial performance for NVIDIA—its quarterly revenue, announced in August, reached $96.2 billion, more than doubling year-over-year; of this, data center revenue amounted to $89 billion, primarily driven by growth in AI chip-related businesses.
Jensen Huang posted on X that the next batch to come online will be 400,000 GPUs, further reinforcing expectations of NVIDIA’s expanding computing power. From ChatGPT to o1, and then to Astra, each technological leap over the past four years has been built upon NVIDIA’s continuously upgraded chips.