My late father, an aeronautical engineer by training, used to work for Aerospatiale, a French state-owned aerospace and defense corporation, that was later merged to form EADS now rebranded Airbus SE. So growing up, I was always fascinated with aviation and military aircrafts and I sometimes draw some analogies from the aerospace industry.
Today, many people think that AGI is close (within ten years, Demis Hassabis from Google gives a 50% chance of achieving AGI in 2030, Dario Amodei from Anthropic sees it in 2026-2027, see my presentation on AGI https://youtu.be/ZzZ8jxq8BU0) or that AGI is already here (see this interesting Nature article “Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00285-6).
My view is that we are probably already in the era of AGI like we have been in the era of of the jet engine and fighter jets for the past eighty years since World War II (the first fighter jet was probably the German Messerschmitt Me 262 in 1942, in the US, it was the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star in 1945).
Deep learning is like the turbojet technology that replaced the piston engines and allowed supersonic flights. The first generation of fighter jets achieved subsonic speed (500mph), and later generations will go to Mach 2 and beyond (though surprisingly the F-35 top speed is Mach 1.6 or around 1,220 mph, the F-22 Raptor achieved Mach 2.2 but was discontinued). To push the analogy, human general intelligence is like the sound barrier (Mach 1). Superintelligence could be the equivalent of Mach 2.
So we had the first generation of AGI with ChatGPT in 2022, the second AGI generation with the reasoning LLM models in 2024, and the third AGI generation with multimodal models that can do text, images, coding and more (GPT-5, Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5) in 2025. This will continue to evolve like the fighter jets (now entering the 6th generation). GPT-6, Gemini 4 Pro and Claude Opus 5 will be the next generation of AGI.
A Lockheed Martin F-35 is light-years ahead of the 1945 Lockheed P-80 aircraft in terms of capabilities and the AGI of tomorrow will probably be light years ahead of the 2022 version of ChatGPT, but not necessarily 100 times more intelligent. The F-35 is twice faster but not 100 times faster than the Lockheed P-80. Maybe we will discover some physical limitations to intelligence based on deep learning or we will run out of data to train the models. It is already happening with public internet data.
In the 1996 movie Twister, Dusty played by Philip Seymour Hoffman shouted “Jo! Bill! It’s Coming! It’s headed right – for us!”, Bill played by Bill Paxton then tells him “It’s already here.”
So welcome to the New Era of AGI.