Sources said Orion's dismal coding performance was due to the lack of sufficient coding data to train the LLM. They added that even though the model has improvements compared to legacy ones, it has become increasingly challenging to justify the massive costs of building and operating new models.

The setbacks may reveal an inconvenient truth for the tech industry plowing tens of billions of dollars into AI data centers and infrastructure, and the feasibility of reaching artificial general intelligence in the near future might be a pipedream.

John Schulman, cofounder and research scientist at OpenAI who recently left, said AGI could be achieved within a few years. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, believes it could be achieved by 2026.