The Giant Magellan Telescope project is an international collaboration to
design, build and operate a 25m telescope for research in astrophysics and
cosmology. The consortium is composed of KASI and several US and
Australian Universities and research institutes. The GMT primary mirror is
comprised of seven 8.4m diameter segments, providing both a collecting area
and diffraction-limited image concentration that are an order of magnitude
better than those offered by current facilities. The telescope will be located
at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and will access the same region of the
sky as the LSST, the Dark Energy Survey, ALMA and a number of other
surveys and front-line facilities. The GMT will have the widest field of view
of any of the proposed ELTs. Adaptive optics is integral to the telescope
via a segmented adaptive secondary mirror.

I will review the scientific goals of the project and the current technical status.
Fabrication of 8.4m off-axis primary mirror segments, the largest technical
challenge, has now been demonstrated. I will review the challenges
associated with implementing a 20 arcminute diameter corrected field of
view and approaches to spectroscopic follow-up of large imaging surveys.
Diffraction-limited operations will be essential to the exploration of planetary
systems and GMT offers unique opportunities as well as technical challenges.
A roadmap for instrumentation development will closely interface with
commissioning plans for the telescope and key scientific opportunities early
in the next decade.