It’s Monday, October 20th: This week, researchers codify what “Artificial General Intelligence” really means while OpenAI accelerates its race for independence.
Head over to our Events Portal to get the latest on upcoming AI Collective gatherings, hackathons, and more near you. Search by city, date, or event format, and join the fun with thousands of builders across 100+ chapters on every continent (except Antarctica, for now).
Ready to dive in? Click below to explore upcoming events.👇
🌁 Based in SF? Check out SF IRL, MLOps SF, GenerativeAISF, or Cerebral Valley’s spreadsheet for more!
SF Spotlight: This Thursday, join The AI Collective + AI Safety Awareness Project for an evening exploring how accelerating AI progress is reshaping humanity — from job automation to AGI forecasting — and what we can do to ensure a safe and aligned future.
This Week’s AI News Roundup
The essential AI headlines you need to know: weekly 🤝
🕹️ New Scientific Benchmark for Defining AGI
News: A 2025 paper titled “A Definition of AGI”—authored by a powerhouse team including Dan Hendrycks, Dawn Song, Erik Brynjolfsson, and others—lays out the most rigorous framework to date for defining Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Details:
Rooted in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities, borrowed from human psychometrics
Evaluates AGI on a wide spectrum: reasoning, problem-solving, learning, memory, transfer of knowledge
Cognitive tests span strata like short-term memory, fluid reasoning, and visual/auditory processing
Benchmarks based on human population norms, not raw metrics
No requirement for biological embodiment—substrate-agnostic performance is the bar
Why it matters: This paper introduces scientific standards for evaluating AGI, not hype. The cross-institutional authorship (UC Berkeley, Center for AI Safety, Google Research, University of Michigan, University of Oxford, MIT, Stanford, University of Montreal) — signals a growing consensus on what AGI actually means. It’s a pivotal step toward building, measuring, and governing general intelligence systems.
🖲️ OpenAI partners with Broadcom for custom AI chips
The News: OpenAI announced a multi-year partnership with Broadcom to co-develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators, marking a decisive move toward vertical integration.
Details:
Co-Development: OpenAI will lead chip and system design, embedding insights from its frontier AI models, while Broadcom manages manufacturing and deployment.
Networking Integration: The new hardware racks will use Broadcom’s Ethernet, PCIe, and optical networking solutions to optimize data throughput.
Timeline: Initial deployments are planned for H2 2026, with a full rollout expected by the end of 2029.
Market Impact: Broadcom stock rose 10% on the news.
Why It Matters: OpenAI joins Amazon and Google in the race for AI silicon supremacy. Building in-house accelerators could grant OpenAI greater control over cost, performance, and supply chain stability—a critical factor amid global GPU shortages. However, Nvidia remains the benchmark for performance-per-watt efficiency. The open question: Can OpenAI’s custom silicon rival Nvidia’s dominance while scaling to 10GW?
🧠 Decentralized AI in Focus: The Next 12 Months
On Tuesday, October 21, the Collective will host an exclusive session at Frontier Tower in San Francisco dedicated to the future of decentralized AI. The event brings together builders, researchers, and investors examining how distributed compute, open-weight ecosystems, and on-chain coordination can reshape model development and governance.
Expect curated talks and conversations with both advocates and skeptics—discussing the technical, social, and economic tradeoffs that will define the next 12 months of decentralized AI. The evening is designed as a high-signal entry point for engineers and researchers exploring the decentralized frontier and presented in collaboration with Bittensor, Crucible Labs, the Ethereum Foundation, and the Linux Foundation’s Open Source AI Week.
Registration is approval-only. Request to join via the link below 👇
Thank You, Grant!
Before we close, we want to extend our thanks to Grant Franzuela, whose eye for operations and attention to detail have helped shape this newsletter into what it is today.
Grant has been an invaluable part of the AI Collective newsletter team behind the scenes these last few months. As he moves onto new chapters, we’re deeply grateful for his contributions and continued support of our mission. Thanks for all you do!
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About the Authors
About Noah Frank
Noah is an researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI. His work and body of research focus on aligning governance strategies to anticipate transformative change before it happens.
About AJ Green
AJ Green is a founder, writer, VC scout, chairman, and respected community leader in the AI and startup space. A former athlete turned tech entrepreneur, AJ is on a mission to make AI the great equalizer scaling startups, connecting ecosystems, and turning disruption into opportunity.