A Google veteran says he's built AGI. Experts remain unconvinced

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI recently announced plans to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2026 with its Grok 5 model, following a similar claim made last year for 2025. Meanwhile, Jad Tarifi, a former Google engineer and CEO of Integral AI, asserts that his company has already built AGI this year. Integral AI defines AGI pragmatically as a system capable of autonomous skill learning, safe and reliable mastery, and energy efficiency—meaning the AI can teach itself new skills without human intervention or pre-existing datasets, learn safely without catastrophic risks, and do so with energy costs comparable to human learning. Integral AI’s approach, termed “interactive learning,” involves a world model that continuously learns, plans efficiently, generalizes knowledge, and safely collects its own training data. Tarifi claims this AGI will revolutionize human experience by enabling universal freedom and allowing people to author their lives more autonomously. However, experts remain skeptical, noting the difficulty in objectively