Artificial general intelligence (AGI): definition

Artificial general intelligence is a hypothetical AI that can understand and perform any intellectual task a human can, as opposed to today’s AI, which is narrow and task-specific.

Today’s AI is narrow: a model that writes well cannot drive a car, and one that plays chess cannot answer your email. AGI is the idea of a single system with human-level general ability across tasks. It does not exist, and experts disagree sharply on whether or when it will.

For a business the useful stance is to ignore the AGI debate and focus on what today’s narrow AI can reliably do. The value is in applying the real, current capability, not betting on the speculative one.

Related terms

Large language model (LLM): A large language model is a neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, summarise, classify, and answer questions across almost any topic.
Agentic AI: Agentic AI refers to systems where a model plans and carries out a multi-step task on its own, deciding and acting in a loop, rather than producing a single response to a single prompt.
Machine learning: Machine learning is a branch of AI where a system learns patterns from data and improves at a task through examples, instead of being programmed with explicit rules.