What is AGI (artificial general intelligence)?

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a hypothetical AI system that could match or outperform people at most kinds of intellectual work, not only at specific tasks. There is no agreed definition and no agreed test for it. OpenAI’s charter, for example, describes it as highly autonomous systems that outperform people at most economically valuable work. Several major AI labs say building it is their goal, and predictions of when, or whether, it will arrive vary widely.

Why it matters for a business

For a business deciding what to do this year, AGI is a debate rather than a capability. Current models are very strong at drafting, summarising, extracting and code, and they still invent facts, lose track over long tasks and need checking where a mistake would be costly. Plans built on what today’s models measurably do on a company’s own work hold up whichever way the AGI debate goes. Plans built on a forecast of it do not.

Go deeper

What an AI model actually is, and how LLMs work

Related terms

• Frontier model
• Large language model (LLM)
• AI benchmarks
• Reasoning model

All terms, A to Z