Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang congratulated OpenAI for launching Astra, calling it a milestone that marks the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) after four years of development from ChatGPT to Astra. Huang posted on September 6 that "From ChatGPT to o1 to Astra in 4 years. AGI has arrived. Congratulations @OpenAI team" [1, 2].
OpenAI unveiled Astra on September 3, describing it as the world's most intelligent and aligned AI model. The company said Astra can perform highly demanding professional tasks with speed, accuracy, and judgment unmatched by earlier models [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. OpenAI President Greg Brockman said, "Welcome to the AGI era," and expressed belief Astra might be seen as the breakthrough model that signifies AGI’s arrival. He added, "I do think we're there." [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was more cautious, calling the term AGI a "very poorly defined term" and an "irrelevant marketing term" [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Meanwhile, critic Gary Marcus disputed Huang's claim that Astra represents AGI, stating Astra meets only one or two of his ten AGI criteria and accusing Huang of offering no evidence or clear definition. Marcus called it "a corporate authority trying to take over what should be scientific discourse" [3].
Astra was trained using over 100,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVLink72 systems. Huang announced Nvidia plans to deploy an additional 400,000 Nvidia GPUs soon to further expand AI computing capacity [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Nvidia’s deep involvement with leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Google, is reflected in its robust data center business. In August, Nvidia reported quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion, more than double the prior year, with $89 billion generated by its data center segment that includes AI chips [2, 3, 4].
The key dates are OpenAI’s Astra unveiling on September 3 and Huang’s public declaration and GPU announcement on September 6. These events signal Nvidia’s intent to significantly scale AI infrastructure alongside OpenAI’s new model [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
