A guy built a $1.8 billion company with his brother and a laptop. A data analyst in Sydney designed an mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog using ChatGPT. A tech founder made his terminal cancer undetectable by treating it like a startup with AI as his co-pilot.

And the world just.. moved on. People scrolled past it. Talked about it for a day. Then went back to arguing about which AI model is better.

Sam Altman wrote something in 2025, I guess. He called it "The Gentle Singularity." And honestly, those two words have been stuck in my head ever since. Because he might be right. The singularity isn't arriving the way science fiction promised us. There's no big explosion. No single moment where everything changes. It's arriving gently. One impossible story at a time. And we're just.. adapting.

If you've been reading me for a while, you know I'm an optimist. Not the blind kind. The kind who looks at the situation, listens, understands, and then forms an opinion. I talk a lot about AI research and where this whole thing is headed. I've been doing this since last year. I share what the industry leaders are saying, what the researchers from different labs are publishing. I put on my take. You appreciate my effort and sometimes correct me when I'm wrong.

So now, I think it's the perfect time to talk about AGI. The singularity. From my point of view.

Are we chasing it right? Or is it some goal that's never going to be achievable? Or is it true that AGI is months away, like you've been seeing the buzz on X? Definitely not on Reddit though, coz Reddit people are wild. A good wild. Lol.

But here's the real question that I want to start with. The question nobody agrees on.

This isn't a regular article where I throw timelines at you. I wanna talk to you here.

Everyone has a different definition of AGI. And I think that tells us something important about this technology that we don't talk about enough.

If we look at the last big tech wave, it was crypto, right? Crypto was subjected to a limited set of opinions. I'm not talking about right or wrong, I'm talking about the range of how people thought about it. It was about making money, it was about NFTs, it was about scams, decentralization, and maybe a handful of other things. A huge mass of people revolved around crypto, but with a relatively small set of takes.

AI is fundamentally different. And I think the reason is this: crypto was a financial tool. You could agree or disagree on its value, but the conversation had boundaries. AI is an intelligence tool. And when you start talking about intelligence itself, the conversation has no boundaries. Because everyone's relationship with intelligence is personal.

A million people in the AI space will give you a million different definitions of AGI. And that's never happened with any technology in history. That level of opinion diversity tells you something. It tells you that this technology touches something deeper than money or convenience. It touches how we think about thinking itself.

And here's what makes it even more interesting.

For some people, AGI is already here.

I've met a few people like this. They've handed over their entire workflow to a $20 Claude subscription. And they say, "Look, I don't have grand ambitions or anything. Whatever I need to do, Claude handles 80-90% of it efficiently. I don't know much about AGI, but for me? This is AGI. I spend a lot of time with my kids now."

That last line is important. Because when a technology frees up your time to be more present with your family, something real has shifted. Not at the research level. At the human level.

Now, I also completely agree that the current AI is just a next-token predictor. We're tweaking algorithms and mechanisms to make it more efficient. But the next-token prediction approach, on its own, will probably never give us true AGI. And I'm not saying this idea is crap. People like Yann LeCun, one of the greatest minds in AI, stand firmly on this.

But here's what I want to do before we try to define AGI in our own terms. Let's look at what we predicted about the future of AI just a couple of years ago.. and where we actually stand now. Because I think the gap between prediction and reality tells us more than any definition.

In 2024, Sam Altman said something that caught my attention.

"In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there's this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company. Which would have been unimaginable without AI — and now it will happen."

When he said this in 2024, most people, including smart people, thought this was years away. Some thought it was never going to happen. A billion-dollar company run by one person? That breaks everything we understand about how businesses work. You need teams, departments, layers of management, thousands of employees.

And look what just happened in 2026.