OpenAI executive Greg Brockman has declared that a new era of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has begun. Dutch experts interviewed by NOS Tech push back hard, arguing the claim cannot be substantiated and looks more like marketing than a scientific milestone.
What happened
According to NOS Tech, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has said that a new era has arrived in the world of artificial intelligence. He referred to AGI, short for artificial general intelligence. OpenAI defines this as the point at which computer systems “work very independently and perform better than humans.”
The problem, several Dutch specialists told NOS Tech, is that Brockman cannot back this up. In a conversation with outlets including the American news site TechCrunch, he called AGI “a spiritual concept.” In other words, it is a feeling that the moment has come, and everyone is free to decide for themselves whether they agree. “Personally, I think it has,” Brockman said, as reported by NOS Tech.
Jan Broersen, professor of artificial intelligence at Utrecht University, told NOS Tech that the term carries a lot of baggage. “The term AGI is about much more than just intelligence for some people in the AI industry,” he said. “That often goes hand in hand with doom scenarios of malicious robots taking over the world.” His concern is what comes next: AI companies then say, in his words, “Let us build that AGI, we will make sure it turns out fine.” To do so, Broersen said, “they draw a lot of money and power towards themselves.”
Broersen also pointed out that there is no agreed definition of AGI at all. “The term has existed for decades,” he told NOS Tech. In the beginning it meant a form of AI that could do more than one thing. Later, all sorts of additions crept in, including human traits such as consciousness or desires. “Nobody knows anymore what it means,” he said.
AI adviser Ilyaz Nasrullah made a similar point with a comparison. Measuring artificial intelligence against human intelligence is strange, he told NOS Tech, “like comparing a submarine with a human. A person can swim, a submarine can also move through water. There is no point in comparing them.” He was clear that this does not make AI programs useless. For sifting through information on the internet, he said, computers will always be faster than people. But calling a machine that runs on computing power “better than a human,” a living being, struck him as odd.
Nasrullah’s conclusion, as told to NOS Tech, was blunt: “AGI does not exist, because you cannot substantively establish what it entails. Brockman does not do that himself either.” He suspects the announcement is mainly marketing. “It makes sure people talk about OpenAI,” he said. Whether people are for or against does not matter to the company, in his view, because either way it gets attention around a system said to perform “better than humans.” As Nasrullah put it, “All publicity is good publicity.”
Both experts also floated a second reading: belief. Nasrullah said some treat AGI almost like a religion, where “you have to believe that AGI has been made.” Broersen agreed this is a serious possibility. Part of the industry genuinely believes it can build systems superior to humans in every respect, he said, and wants to enter the history books as the people who made AGI. In his words, “They want to play God.” Broersen added that within science, AGI is not taken very seriously.
Why it matters in the Netherlands
For internationals living and working here, the practical takeaway is caution rather than alarm. The NOS Tech piece is not reporting a proven technical breakthrough. It is reporting a claim from a company executive that two Dutch academics and advisers say cannot be verified. That distinction matters when you decide how much weight to give the hype around AI tools you may use at work or at home.
On jobs, the framing of “better than humans” is exactly the kind of language that fuels worry about roles being automated. The experts quoted by NOS Tech do not deny that computers are genuinely useful, especially for searching and processing large amounts of information faster than any person can. That is a realistic description of where these tools help today: drafting, summarising, translating and searching. It is a long way from the sweeping claim that machines now outperform people in general.
On costs and daily life, Broersen’s warning about money and power is worth keeping in mind. He told NOS Tech that grand AGI claims help AI companies attract funding and influence. For consumers, that can translate into pressure to adopt paid AI features and subscriptions marketed as near-superhuman. Reading past the marketing, as Nasrullah advises, is a useful habit before spending money on tools sold on the strength of a “spiritual concept.”
For the Dutch tech sector, the debate is a reminder that serious expertise sits close to home. Utrecht University and independent Dutch advisers are willing to challenge the biggest names in the field in public. That scepticism is healthy for a country that hosts a growing number of AI startups, research groups and international tech workers. It signals that Dutch institutions weigh these claims critically rather than simply importing Silicon Valley narratives.
What to watch next
The first thing to watch is whether OpenAI or its leadership offers any concrete definition or evidence for the AGI claim. As NOS Tech reports, Brockman himself did not, and instead invited everyone to decide for themselves. If a testable definition appears, the conversation changes. Until then, treat “AGI has arrived” as a marketing statement, not a measured result.
Second, watch how the language around these systems shapes policy and spending. The NOS Tech piece links the AGI narrative to demands for money and power, and separately notes that in science AGI is not taken very seriously. Those two currents, industry belief and academic doubt, will keep pulling in different directions. For internationals here, the sensible approach is to judge each AI tool on what it actually does for you, not on the era it is said to represent.
Source: NOS Tech
Sources
- nos.nl: Nieuw tijdperk van superintelligente AI aangebroken, zegt OpenAI, accessed 17 September 2026
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