Chollet refuses to 'declare AGI' — his bar is invention, not benchmarks

François Chollet said on X on September 7 that he would not "declare AGI" until AI is capable of invention — the most prominent refusal in a week of declarations around OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. It landed a day after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared "AGI has arrived", with OpenAI still calling Astra the start of the "AGI era."

"The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention — 'it will cure cancer', 'it will solve fusion energy', etc.," Chollet wrote. "So I would not 'declare AGI' until we have AI that is, at last, capable of invention — conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, new real-world technology, etc." Minutes later he added: "An AGI system should be capable to come up with more than what you put in it."

The invention test after the benchmark got saturated

OpenAI built part of its Astra case on Chollet's own instrument. Our launch coverage noted the headline 99.9% ARC-AGI-3 score — the series Chollet created to measure the gap toward AGI — carried a harness footnote. ARC Prize's independent evaluation, published September 3, confirmed state-of-the-art results: 62.7% on the standard harness, 99.9% on the provider-adapter harness. ARC Prize called Astra "a noticeable step-function change in frontier model capabilities" — yet "we are not claiming that it is AGI," having warned at launch that saturating the benchmark would not prove AGI.

That is consistent with his long-held line: he defines AGI as the ability to acquire any skill a human can, as efficiently as a human can — a test about adaptation and learning efficiency, not raw scores. It is the same argument he made to Huang in March, when frontier models scored under 1% on the just-released ARC-AGI-3. What changed is that his own benchmark has now been cleared, and the goalpost has moved to territory no benchmark measures.

Who gets to declare AGI

Declarations are framing, not measurement. OpenAI's executives define AGI in terms their products satisfy; Huang ties it to compute and capability; each definition conveniently crowns the claimant. Chollet is not a neutral referee either — ARC Prize runs the field's agreed yardstick, his startup Ndea is racing toward AGI, and his refusal keeps that yardstick relevant.

Yet "capable of invention" is not operationalized either. Nothing measures it yet, so as a declaration it is as unfalsifiable today as OpenAI's "AGI era" — with one difference: it concedes nobody is in a position to declare. Even sympathetic readers noted the bar may overshoot: "That sounds more like ASI than AGI," read a top reply to his thread, which has since passed 2,700 likes. On r/singularity, where a thread quoting him drew hundreds of comments, the recurring charge was goalpost-moving — though Chollet would say they were planted in 2019, before the Pachocki essay and Huang's post made declarations fashionable.