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AGI (artificial general intelligence)

The hypothetical AI capable of any human intellectual task.

The analogy

Today's AIs are like elite athletes in single disciplines: unbeatable in their event, lost outside it. AGI would be the universal decathlete: able to learn any new discipline at human level without being retrained for each one.

In detail

AGI refers to a system with general cognitive ability comparable to a human's: transferring learning across domains, long-term planning, continuous learning. There is no agreed definition or credible date — expert predictions range from years to decades. Much of the AI-safety debate revolves around how to develop it responsibly.

An example

An LLM can win a math olympiad and at the same time fail to count the letters in a word. That unevenness is what separates today's systems from general intelligence.

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