CONCEPT
Artificial General Intelligence
AGI: a hypothetical system with human-level cognitive ability across essentially every domain. The transition-point that AI-safety thinking orients around, even when no one agrees on what it is.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the hypothesized AI system that can perform, at human level or better, the full range of cognitive tasks a human can. There is no agreed operational definition; the contested question is whether currently-capable large language models already qualify, are on a direct path to qualifying, or are fundamentally different. Every major AI lab has a public position, and the positions differ enough to be substantive disagreements about what AI is and where it is going.
In The You On AI Field Guide
AGI is the polarizing word at the center of AI discourse. Frontier-lab leaders (OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, DeepMind's Demis Hassabis) publicly discuss it as imminent or inevitable; many academic researchers (Gary Marcus, Yann LeCun in certain registers, Rodney Brooks) consider the term marketing. The honest position for a general reader is that the word is doing different work for different people, and understanding what the word is doing in a particular conversation is