Artificial general intelligence
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Beyond AGI, artificial superintelligence (ASI) would outperform the best human abilities across every domain by a wide margin. Unlike artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), whose competence is confined to well‑defined tasks, an AGI system can generalise knowledge, transfer skills between domains, and solve novel problems without task‑specific reprogramming. Creating AGI is a stated goal of technology companies such as OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Meta. A 2020 survey identified 72 active AGI research and development projects across 37 countries. AGI is a common topic in science fiction and futures studies. Contention exists over whether AGI represents an existential risk. Some AI experts and industry figures have stated that mitigating the risk of human extinction posed by AGI should be a global priority. Others find the development of AGI to be in too remote a stage to present such a risk. == Terminology == AGI is also known as strong AI, full AI, human-level AI, human-level intelligent AI, or general intelligent action. The term "artificial general intelligence" was used in 1997 by Mark Gubrud in a discussion of the implications of fully automated military production and operations. A mathematical formalism of AGI named AIXI was proposed in 2000 by Marcus Hutter, who defines intelligence as "an agent’s ability to achieve goals or succeed in a wide range of environments". This type of AGI has also been called "universal artificial intelligence". The term AGI was re-introduced and popularized by Shane Legg and Ben Goertzel around 2002. Some academic sources reserve the term "strong AI" for computer programs that will experience sentience or consciousness. In contrast, weak AI (or narrow AI) can solve a specific problem but lacks general cognitive abilities. Some academic sources use "weak AI" to refer more broadly to any programs that neither experience consciousness nor have a mind in the same sense as humans. Related concepts include artificial superintelligence and transformative AI. An artificial superintelligence (ASI) is a hypothetical type of AGI that is much more generally intelligent than humans, while the notion of transformative AI relates to AI having a large impact on society, for example, similar to the agricultural or industrial revolution. A framework for classifying AGI was proposed in 2023 by Google DeepMind researchers. They define five performance levels of AGI: emerging, competent, expert, virtuoso, and superhuman. For example, a competent AGI is defined as an AI that outperforms 50% of skilled adults in a wide range of non-physical tasks, and a superhuman AGI (i.e., an artificial superintelligence) is similarly defined but with a threshold of 100%. They consider large language models like ChatGPT or LLaMA 2 to be instances of emerging AGI (comparable to unskilled humans). Regarding the autonomy of AGI and associated risks, they define five levels: tool (fully in human control), consultant, collaborator, expert, and agent (fully autonomous). == Characteristics == There is no single agreed-upon definition of intelligence as applied to computers. Computer scientist John McCarthy wrote in 2007: "We cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of computational procedures we want to call intelligent." === Intelligence traits === Researchers generally hold that a system is required to do all of the following to be regarded as an AGI: reason, use strategy, solve puzzles, and make judgments under uncertainty, represent knowledge, including common sense knowledge, plan, learn, communicate in natural language, if necessary, integrate these skills in completion of any given goal. Many interdisciplinary approaches (e.g. cognitive science, computational intelligence, and decision making) consider additional traits such as imagination (the ability to form novel mental images and concepts) and autonomy. Computer-based systems exhibiting these capabilities are now widespread, with modern large language models demonstrating computational creativity, automated reasoning, and decision support simultaneously across domains. === Physical traits === Other capabilities are considered desirable in intelligent systems, as they may affect intelligence or aid in its expression. These include: the ability to sense (e.g. see, hear, etc.), and the ability to act (e.g. move and manipulate objects, change location to explore, etc.) This includes the ability to detect and respond to hazard. === Tests for human-level AGI === Several tests meant to confirm human-level AGI have been considered. ==== Turing test ==== The Turing test was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". This test involves a human judge engaging in natural language conversations with both a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The machine passes the test if it can convince the judge that it is human a significant fraction of the time. Turing proposed this as a practical measure of machine intelligence, focusing on the ability to produce human-like responses rather than on the internal workings of the machine. The idea of the test is that the machine has to try and pretend to be a man, by answering questions put to it, and it will only pass if the pretence is reasonably convincing. A considerable portion of a jury, who should not be experts about machines, must be taken in by the pretence. In 2014, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman, designed to imitate a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, reportedly passed a Turing Test event by convincing 33% of judges that it was human. However, this claim was met with significant skepticism from the AI research community, who questioned the test's implementation and its relevance to AGI. A 2025 pre‑registered, three‑party Turing‑test study by Cameron R. Jones and Benjamin K. Bergen showed that GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human in 73% of five‑minute text conversations—surpassing the 67% humanness rate of real confederates and meeting the researchers' criterion for having passed the test. ==== Ikea test ==== The "Ikea test", also known as the Flat Pack Furniture Test, involves an AI controlling a robot which attempts to assemble an Ikea flat-pack furniture product after having been shown the parts and instructions. As early as 2013, MIT's IkeaBot demonstrated fully autonomous multi-robot assembly of an IKEA Lack table in ten minutes, with no human intervention and no pre-programmed assembly instructions. The robots inferred the assembly sequence from the geometry of the parts alone. ==== Coffee test ==== Steve Wozniak proposed a test where a machine is required to enter an average American home and figure out how to make coffee. It must find the coffee machine, find the coffee, add water, find a mug, and brew the coffee by pushing the proper buttons. This test has been substantially approached across multiple systems. In January 2024, Figure AI's Figure 01 humanoid learned to operate a Keurig coffee machine autonomously after watching video demonstrations, using end-to-end neural networks to translate visual input into motor actions. In 2025, researchers at the University of Edinburgh published the ELLMER framework in Nature Machine Intelligence, demonstrating a robotic arm that interprets verbal instructions, analyses its surroundings, and autonomously makes coffee in dynamic kitchen environments — adapting to unforeseen obstacles in real time rather than following pre-programmed sequences. ==== Suleyman's test ==== Mustafa Suleyman's test proposes giving an AI model US$100,000 and asking it to obtain US$1 million. ==== Use of video-games ==== Adams, et al. propose that the ability to learn and succeed in a wide range of video games can be used to test AI intelligence. This range would include games unknown to the AGI developers before the test is administered. === AI-complete problems === A problem is informally called "AI-complete" or "AI-hard" if it is believed that AGI would be needed to solve it, because the solution is beyond the capabilities of a purpose-specific algorithm. == History == === Classical AI === Modern AI research began in the mid-1950s. The first generation of AI researchers were convinced that artificial general intelligence was possible and that it would exist in just a few decades. AI pioneer Herbert A. Simon wrote in 1965: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do". Their predictions were the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's fictional character HAL 9000, who embodied what AI researchers believed they could create by the year 2001. AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was a consultant on the project of making HAL 9000 as realistic as possible according to the consensus predictions of the time. He said in 1967, "Within a generation... the problem of
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