What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is most commonly defined as AI that can do essentially all of the cognitive tasks that humans do, at a comparable or higher performance level.1 AGI is often contrasted with narrow AI, which can only perform one specific task or a few closely related tasks, such as playing board games or recommending products.

Nobody has built AGI yet, but some AI labs are explicitly trying to. Many experts expect that AGI will be built in the not-too-distant future. We don’t know what the first AGI will look like or whether it can be produced by scaling current architectures (such as GPT).


  1. There isn't a universally agreed-upon definition for AGI, and there are multiple terms for similar concepts. ↩︎