Robots are smarter than us now, says the man selling robots. Almost as if he has a stake in the matter…
The man in question is Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang, who, to be fair, sells chips to every major artificial intelligence (AI) lab and, therefore, sees demand before the rest of us do. When he posted on X in September that “AGI has arrived,” citing OpenAI’s new GPT-6 and the Nvidia chips behind it, investors weighed the implications of such a breakthrough.
Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a “Double Down” signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same “Total Conviction” signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »
You should count yourself an interested party if you own any of the “Magnificent Seven” or companies that do business with those giants. Or even if you simply work for a living. You have a stake in whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) is on its way.
So, if the acronyms have started to blur together (AGI, API, ASI, there are so many), below is a crash course on what could be the most defining technology of the next decade. At the end, we’ll share the top three stocks that stand to benefit from AGI’s arrival.
What Is AGI, Anyway?
In plain English, AGI is artificial intelligence that’s as capable as a skilled worker at most jobs.
Today’s AI models may be decent coders or data analysts, but they can’t work for long stretches without supervision or pick up new skills as they go. AGI, however, could theoretically replace one of your co-workers, and the only tell would be the empty desk next to you.
For companies building AI, a more practical question is when AGI starts making money, so some measure the milestone in dollars. Huang, for instance, told podcaster Lex Fridman in March that true AGI would be capable of building a billion-dollar company (a bar he believes today’s AI clears).
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and OpenAI had more riding on the definition, since an official AGI declaration would have cut off Microsoft’s rights to OpenAI’s technology. In their contract, they defined AGI as systems capable of earning about $100 billion in profit for OpenAI’s early investors, Microsoft among them. They’ve since scrapped that clause, since a term with no universally agreed definition is a shaky tripwire for a multi-billion dollar deal.
Where researchers find more common ground is in the stages along the way to AGI and beyond.
| Level | What It Can Do | Where We Are |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Narrow AI | Specializes in a specific task (chess, spam filters) | Already built and widely used |
| 2. Generative AI | Writes, codes, and more, but needs a human to check its work | Today’s chatbots, such as Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT |
| 3. Artificial general intelligence |
Does most work a capable human can, unsupervised | Achieved according to Huang, disputed by many researchers |
| 4. Artificial super intelligence |
Beats the best humans at nearly everything | Hypothetical |
Today’s best models are on that second rung, mostly because of the supervision problem mentioned above. Research group METR found that the longer the task, the worse AI does; and when left alone on a job that would take a person two workdays, top models succeed only about half the time. That’s unreliable enough that your co-worker’s desk remains occupied, for now.
GPT-6, the model Huang praised, is too new to have gone through METR’s testing, so its reliability for long tasks is unproven. That leaves the open question of how close we are to AGI; and you’ll notice each tech leader’s view tends to line up with what’s best for their business.
How Close Are We?
It depends on whom you ask.
ALREADY HERE
Jensen Huang, Nvidia
Huang has declared AGI’s arrival twice this year, first on a March podcast and again in his September post about GPT-6. Of the seven leaders on this list, he’s the only one who says the threshold is already behind us.
NEXT MODEL
Elon Musk, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) and xAI
Musk keeps setting deadlines for AGI, and he keeps missing them. He predicted in 2024 that AGI would arrive by 2025, then pushed his forecast to 2026. He now says xAI’s next major model, Grok 5, will be the one to reach it.
BY DECEMBER
Sam Altman, OpenAI
Huang called OpenAI’s new model AGI, but OpenAI’s own CEO hasn’t gone that far. A week before GPT-6 launched, Altman told Time that OpenAI was “not quite yet” there, though he expects an internal system he would call AGI by year-end. His chief research officer puts the company “80% of the way” to AGI.
IN SIGHT
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META)
Zuckerberg rarely discusses AGI. He skipped straight to “superintelligence,” or ASI, and Meta’s annual report now lists delivering “personal superintelligence for everyone” as part of its vision. In a July 2025 letter, he wrote that Meta had “begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves.”
EARLY 2030s
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL)
Pichai expects AGI shortly after 2030. Until then, he says, we’re in an era of “artificial jagged intelligence,” where models solve advanced coding and science problems yet stumble over tasks a child could handle. His caution hasn’t slowed Alphabet’s spending, though, since he told investors in July that competing at the frontier of AGI development is the company’s first priority.
PROOF FIRST
Andy Jassy, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)
Jassy hasn’t put a date on AGI, and Amazon’s AGI chief, Peter DeSantis, said in June that models need to be about 100 times more efficient before AI comes close. So Amazon makes sure it already has committed contracts for much of the new capacity it builds. AWS customers have signed $496 billion in contracts for future services, meaning they’ve committed to spending more than twice what Amazon itself is spending this year.
WRONG QUESTION
Satya Nadella, Microsoft
Nadella, the group’s contrarian, described companies announcing their own AGI milestones as “nonsensical benchmark hacking” and believes AI should be measured by its ability to drive economic growth. He also cautioned that AI models are getting commoditized, so most of AI’s profits will go to companies selling the software and cloud platforms that businesses run AI on. That view happens to serve Microsoft, which owns Windows, Office, and Azure.
Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) leaders, both former CEO Tim Cook and successor John Ternus, have said little about AGI, which tracks with how slowly the company has moved on AI. Apple seems to figure that however smart AI gets, it will need a place to live … and Apple already owns that real estate, in more than a billion pockets.
Beyond the Magnificent 7, predictions for when AGI arrives are even more ambitious.
Masayoshi Son has reorganized SoftBank Group (OTC: SFTBY) around artificial super intelligence. He told shareholders that AGI is less than 10 years away and that ASI, at roughly 10,000 times human intelligence, won’t be far behind. SoftBank also owns most of Arm Holdings (NASDAQ: ARM) and a big slice of OpenAI; so Son, like Huang and others, profits from the future he predicts.
A few other patterns stand out here.
- Most CEOs say soon. Of the leaders who offered a forecast, Pichai’s timeline is the longest, and even he expects AGI within about five years. Many of the others say it’s a couple of years off or has already happened.
- Caution hasn’t slowed spending. Pichai thinks AGI is years away and Jassy hasn’t given a timeline, yet Alphabet and Amazon each plan to spend around $200 billion or more on data centers and equipment this year.
- Some don’t need the label. Microsoft and Meta are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, but neither CEO claims AGI is here, likely because their business models don’t depend on it. Microsoft rents AI through Azure and sells Copilot, and Meta uses AI to target ads, so both profit from better AI regardless.
Setting CEOs’ incentives aside, the model that set off this debate offers evidence for both camps. Here’s how GPT-6 Astra, the OpenAI release behind Huang’s post, stacks up.
| Signs AGI is close | Reasons for doubt |
|---|---|
| Astra scored 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, a test built to stump AI with unfamiliar puzzles | Most of Astra’s top scores come from OpenAI’s own testing |
| Astra can control computer systems on its own, from spreadsheets to full websites | When Astra doesn’t know an answer, it makes one up about half the time instead of admitting it, per evaluator Artificial Analysis |
| Astra scored 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, a set of research-level math problems | Independent testing found Astra only tied Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 on overall intelligence |
Regardless of a consensus around whether AGI is here or not, what’s inarguable is that the gap between AI and AGI is shrinking with every new model release. For investors, the bigger opportunity is who profits on the way to AGI.
Who Cashes In on AGI
The largest tech companies are betting record sums on AI’s next leap. This year, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft plan to spend up to $745 billion on capital projects (long-term investments like buildings and equipment). Most of that money will go toward AI data centers.
That’s a heavy bill, even for these giants. JP Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) estimates the biggest cloud companies will spend about 93% of operating cash flow on AI this year, up from 33% in 2023. Alphabet even announced plans in June to sell up to $84.75 billion of new stock to help fund its build-out.
If AGI shows up sooner rather than later, these companies could earn back their spending many times over. But if progress stalls, the industry could end up with far more data centers than it can fill.
Meanwhile, I (Meilin here) see three companies as especially well-positioned to benefit from all that spending.
- Nvidia: At the risk of stating the obvious, Nvidia’s chips run a large share of the world’s AI data centers. Last quarter, its sales more than doubled to $96.2 billion. Management expects about 90% growth this quarter, yet Nvidia still can’t make chips fast enough to meet demand. Every step closer to AGI means labs need more computing power, and Nvidia is the company selling that horsepower.
- Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO): Broadcom designs custom AI chips for Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI, all of whom want cheaper alternatives to Nvidia’s pricey GPUs. Its AI chip sales more than tripled last quarter to $16.7 billion, and management expects AI revenue to roughly double to about $115 billion next fiscal year. That Broadcom and Nvidia both more than doubled AI sales suggests demand can support multiple winners.
- Alphabet: Alphabet develops frontier AI models of its own while renting computing power to peers building theirs. That rental business is booming, as Google Cloud revenue grew 82% last quarter to $24.8 billion. Its cloud backlog, which counts work customers have committed to but Alphabet hasn’t delivered yet, reached $514 billion, and just over half of it should turn into revenue within two years.
Notice what these picks share. None of them requires AGI to arrive on time — or ever — but each banks on other people believing it will. So far, that belief is holding up, judging by big tech’s record spending on AI this year.
That cuts both ways, since big tech is increasingly borrowing to pay for its AI build-out and lenders have started charging more for that debt. Alphabet spent more cash than it brought in last quarter, which hadn’t happened since it went public in 2004. If any major spender decided to slow its build-out, all three of these companies would likely feel it at once.
The Bottom Line
Either of the following occurrences could expedite the timeline for AGI.
- Models that learn on the job. Today’s AI can’t pick up new skills once its training ends. If a model could learn your company’s work over its first few weeks like a new employee would, however, it would close one of AI’s biggest remaining gaps.
- AI that works reliably for days. Top models now succeed about half the time on tasks that take a person two workdays. Once they can finish weeklong projects most of the time, AI could replace individual employees. That would go far beyond today’s AI, which mostly handles single tasks despite what some companies suggest when announcing layoffs.
Neither has happened yet, which gives investors time to prepare.
- Know your exposure. The Magnificent 7 make up roughly a third of the S&P 500, so an index fund already ties a big share of your money to the AI build-out. Add in any other tech stocks you own, and your stake is likely bigger than you think.
- Favor companies with paying customers. Look for AI businesses with rising sales and signed contracts (e.g., Google Cloud’s $514 billion backlog) over companies counting on a breakthrough years from now.
- Think in years. If AGI is a decade out, there’s no rush to buy everything at once. Dollar-cost averaging lowers the risk of buying at a peak.
When AGI arrives, you won’t need to hear it from the man selling robots, since it’ll be written all over the economy and in your portfolios.
Should you buy stock in Microsoft right now?
Before you buy stock in Microsoft, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Microsoft wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004… if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $376,696!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005… if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,333,920!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 925% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 212% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
*Stock Advisor returns as of October 20, 2026.
JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Meilin Quinn has positions in Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Arm Holdings, Broadcom, JPMorgan Chase, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
