Author: Xu Chao, Wallstreetcn.com
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declared the era of Artificial General Intelligence officially open, attributing this historic milestone to OpenAI's latest flagship model Astra—a model trained on NVIDIA chips. This statement once again positions NVIDIA as the dominant force in AI infrastructure and hints at a significant upcoming expansion in computational power.
On Sunday, Huang posted on the X platform to congratulate the OpenAI team, stating "AGI has arrived," and revealed that Astra was trained on more than approximately 100,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72 chips. He also stated, "400K GPUs are coming online," sending a strong signal that NVIDIA's computing power supply is set to leap forward.
This statement has direct market implications. NVIDIA's data center business has become its core growth engine, and Huang's preview of 400,000 new GPUs indicates that demand for orders from leading AI customers continues to expand.
OpenAI released Astra last Thursday, positioning it as "the world's most intelligent and human-aligned model," and stated that the model can "tackle the most demanding professional work with unmatched speed, precision, and judgment." OpenAI President Greg Brockman told the media during the launch: "Welcome to the era of AGI."
Brockman further predicted that when people look back at history, they will believe AGI was born "around this time, and I think maybe it's this model." "Personally, I do think we've reached it," he said. Astra began rolling out to users this week.
OpenAI defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work," and positions Astra as a major research breakthrough, marking a fundamental shift in the boundaries of tasks that can be entrusted to AI.
However, not everyone agrees with this declaration. Prominent AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus directly stated that Huang was being "premature."
"Huang gave neither evidence nor a definition, and to me this looks like an attempt to impose a corporate will on a scientific question," Marcus wrote on his Substack. "Declaring victory in the absence of a definition only muddies the waters."
Marcus then listed his own 10 criteria for defining AGI, noting that Astra meets only one or two. "By common definitions, Astra still falls short," he said.
Even OpenAI's own CEO, Sam Altman, has been quite cautious about the concept. He recently stated on the "Sources" podcast that AGI is at best "an extremely poorly defined word. I was going to say, it's more like an irrelevant marketing term."
Regardless of how the definition of AGI is debated, NVIDIA's position as the core computing power supplier for leading AI companies is undisputed. In a funding announcement this March, OpenAI referred to NVIDIA as "the bedrock of our infrastructure," stating that "our training clusters and most of our inference stack consistently run on NVIDIA GPUs."
Leading AI companies such as Meta, Anthropic, and Google also heavily rely on NVIDIA's high-end chips. This demand has translated into NVIDIA's impressive financial performance—the company reported quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion in August this year, more than doubling year-over-year; its data center business revenue reached $89 billion, with AI chips being a major growth driver.
Huang's post on X mentioned that the next batch going online will be 400,000 GPUs, further strengthening expectations of NVIDIA's computing power expansion. From ChatGPT to o1, to Astra, the technological leaps within four years have all been built upon NVIDIA's continuously upgraded chip foundation.
