AI Vocabulary · 01 The Model

What is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)?

AI that would match or exceed people across a broad range of tasks. There is no agreed definition, and no agreed test.

Intermediate

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence: AI that is not good at one thing but broadly capable, at the level of people or beyond. The term is everywhere, in company strategies, funding rounds and headlines, but it means different things to different people.

Three examples of how it is defined:

• Economic: OpenAI's Charter describes AGI as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.
• In levels: researchers at Google DeepMind proposed in 2023 to rate systems by depth of performance and breadth of generality, plus autonomy, instead of a yes or no.
• As a measure: Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter set out in 2007 to formalise intelligence as a general measure for machines, starting from the observation that there was no agreed definition.

All three sources come from people or companies working towards such systems. Whether, when and how AGI will arrive is disputed, and there is no accepted test that would settle it.

Why it matters for you

AGI claims move money, policy and expectations. Don't plan your business on a date someone announced. Plan on what today's systems demonstrably do for your tasks.

Own it

When someone says "AGI", ask which definition they mean and how it would be measured. Then return to the practical question: what can this system do for us now, and what does it cost?

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