The 5 steps OpenAI thinks will lead to AI building and running companies

A little while ago I shared Sam Altman’s vision that one day soon Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be able to build its own company, as I’ve been predicting for a decade or so now. And recently Bloomberg reported that OpenAI had defined five distinct stages of innovation in AI, from rudimentary chatbots to advanced systems capable of doing the work of an entire organization.

These stages could inform OpenAI’s future plans as it works toward its ultimate goal of building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an AI smart and capable enough to perform all of the same work as a human.

According to the Bloomberg report, OpenAI’s leaders shared the following five stages internally to employees in early July during an all-hands meeting:

• Stage 1: “Chatbots, AI with conversational language”
• Stage 2: “Reasoners, human-level problem solving”
• Stage 3: “Agents, systems that can take actions”
• Stage 4: “Innovators, AI that can aid in invention”
• Stage 5: “Organizations, AI that can do the work of an organization”

On July 23, the company posted briefly about the topic on X: “We are developing levels to help us and stakeholders categorize and track AI progress. This is a work in progress and we’ll share more soon.”

Olivier Toubia, the Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, believes the five steps more closely resemble a plan to make human workers obsolete than a roadmap to AGI. With the exception of reasoning, he says, all of the outlined stages are more focused on business uses than they are on the actual science.

Toubia broke down what entrepreneurs need to know about OpenAI’s five stages:

Stage 1: Chatbots

Bloomberg reported that OpenAI told employees that the company is still currently on the first stage, dubbed Chatbots. This stage is best exemplified by OpenAI’s own ChatGPT, which shocked the world with its ability to converse in natural language when it was released in late 2022. Many organizations are using chatbots to enhance their internal productivity, Toubia says, while others are using the tech to power outward-facing customer service bots.

While these chatbots may seem superhumanly smart at first glance, they’re smoother talkers than they are operators. Chatbots will often make up and present false information with full confidence, and unless they’ve been set up to retrieve info from a businesses’ data center, they don’t have much commercial utility. Even Sam Altman has referred to the current iteration of ChatGPT as “incredibly dumb.”

Stage 2: Reasoners

OpenAI told employees that it is close to creating AI models that could be classified in its second stage: Reasoners. According to Bloomberg, Reasoners are systems “that can do basic problem-solving tasks as well as a human with a doctorate-level education who doesn’t have access to any tools.”

Last week, Reuters reported that OpenAI is currently at work on a new “reasoning” AI model, code-named Strawberry, focused on capabilities like being able to plan ahead and work through difficult problems with multiple steps. Reuters reported that leaders in the AI space believe that by improving reasoning, their models will be empowered to handle a wide variety of tasks, “from making major scientific discoveries to planning and building new software applications.”

Stage 3: Agents

OpenAI doesn’t believe that innovation in AI has reached the Agent stage, which it refers to as “systems that can take actions on a user’s behalf.” Outside of OpenAI, much has been made of the potential value of digital workers who can operate autonomously, but few companies have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of AI Agents. Lattice, a popular HR software provider, recently announced plans to onboard AI Agents directly into a company’s org chart, but scuttled the idea after online backlash.

“From what I understand,” says Toubia, AI Agents “could replace you for a few days when you go on vacation.” Such an Agent would act as a proxy for vacationing employees, picking up the slack, completing simple tasks, and keeping vacationers updated on what happened while they were away.

“I have a bit of a cynical view on this one,” Toubia says, “people will welcome an Agent that’s going to let them go on vacation more often, but based on the next steps, the goal is not just to replace you when you go on vacation, it’s to replace you altogether.”

Stage 4: Innovators

According to Bloomberg, Innovators refers to “AI that can aid in invention.” In some ways, Toubia says, AI Innovators are already here. They’re helping people generate ideas, write code, and create art.

“With a bit of guidance,” he says, “you can get ChatGPT to come up with ideas for a new app or a new digital product, and then create code and promotional materials.”

Because of this, Toubia predicts that Innovators, as defined by OpenAI, will mostly come in the form of AI systems specifically developed to help prototype, build, and manufacture physical products.

Stage 5: Organizations

In OpenAI’s proposed final stage of AI innovation, AI systems will become advanced and smart enough to do the work of an entire organization. Toubia says this should be a wake-up call for managers, who may have previously considered themselves safe from being replaced by AI, adding that even a company’s founders could be considered expendable if the system finds that they’re standing in the way of true efficiency.

Toubia worries that by classifying Organizations as the final step in its “roadmap to intelligence,” OpenAI may be tipping its hand regarding its ambitions.

“This really seems to be a roadmap toward taking over the world,” he says, “replacing complete organizations and making humans obsolete in the process.” Going forward, he says, it may be CEOs who need to justify their paychecks.