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AGI Definitions

"AGI" is contested and often misused. On the most prominent definitions — DeepMind, Bengio 2025, Hinton, OpenAI — current AI (Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5) is superhuman in some cognitive tasks but still below most humans at multi-day tasks, visual navigation, adversarial social interactions, and metacognition. We're at "emerging AGI," not "competent AGI."

Created Apr 13, 2026·Updated Apr 13, 2026

The Term's History

"AGI" (artificial general intelligence) was introduced around 2007 by Ben Goertzel as a contrast to "narrow AI" — systems that can only do a small range of tasks. Marcus Hutter and Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder) formalized it in a 2007 paper as "an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments."

70% of attendees at major AI conferences know what AGI stands for. 10% of the public does.

Four Prominent Definitions (2026)

  1. DeepMind (Legg et al., 2023, updated 2025) — Levels framework. Generality × Capability. "Competent AGI" = 50th percentile of skilled humans at a wide range of non-physical tasks (including metacognitive tasks). Current assessment: "emerging AGI" but not "competent AGI."

  2. Bengio et al., 2025 — Matches human cognitive versatility across 10 key capabilities. GPT-5 scored 57% against this framework — near human level on knowledge, reading, writing, math; way below on speed, memory, visual, and auditory processing.

  3. Hinton — "At least as good as humans at nearly all of the cognitive tasks that humans do."

  4. OpenAI — "Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." For most jobs, you'd prefer to hire an AI over a human. Not yet reached.

Where Current AI Stands (April 2026)

Already superhuman:

  • Reading text and recalling information (more languages than any human)
  • Multi-hour coding tasks and math/science questions with known answers
  • Expert-level performance on knowledge benchmarks

Still below almost all humans:

  • Tasks requiring more than 2-3 days to complete (e.g., organizing a contractor to decorate a bathroom)
  • Visual manipulation and navigation (simple web navigation, drone piloting)
  • Adversarial social interactions (managing a vending machine when someone is trying to scam you; can't beat children at Pokémon)
  • Metacognition: learning from experience longer than ~1 week context length, calibrated confidence

Still below expert humans:

  • Novel research
  • Leading a company
  • Especially important cognitive skills requiring true strategic judgment

Claude Opus 4.6 improved dramatically at the Pokémon benchmark (10x faster than Opus 4.5), but frontier models still can't beat children at this multiday, agentic task.

The "Scaffolding" Counterargument

A common response: "the raw intelligence is already there — it just needs the right scaffolding." Benjamin Todd (80,000 Hours) argues this is partly wrong: some gaps appear to be gaps in raw capabilities, not scaffolding. And even if scaffolding were sufficient, building it is a substantial challenge. "If it's not been built yet, then we don't yet have AGI."

The picture is better captured as jagged capabilities (Helen Toner): AI today is superhuman in some ways, subhuman in others. The jaggedness is expected to persist long into any transformative period.

Why the Distinction Matters

AI narrower than humans remains a tool that makes humans more productive (like electricity or the internet). True AGI — able to do almost everything a human can — acts as an expansion of the labor pool, a new species, or potentially an independent agent. Different implications entirely:

  • Explosive economic growth via independent scientific research
  • Human disempowerment risks
  • Intelligence explosion if AI can automate AI R&D
  • 100 years of scientific progress in 10

"Insisting that we already have AGI is rhetorically deflationary. If AGI is such a big deal, why aren't things crazier? When we have true AGI, things are going to get much wilder than today."

Better: Specific Capability Milestones

AI Futures (AI 2027) proposes dropping "AGI" in favor of:

  • Automated Coder (AC) — can fully automate an AGI project's coding work, replacing the project's entire software engineering staff
  • Superhuman AI Researcher (SAR) — can fully automate AI R&D
  • Superintelligent AI Researcher (SIAR) — 2x the capability gap of top human vs. median researcher
  • Top-Human-Expert-Dominating AI (TED-AI) — at least as good as top human experts at virtually all cognitive tasks
  • Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) — 2x better than best humans vs. median professional, at virtually all cognitive tasks

Also: Transformative AI (Holden Karnofsky) — AI capable of causing socioeconomic change of a similar scale to the industrial revolution. Allows for transformative systems that aren't highly general (e.g., amazing at scientific research, bad at most other jobs).

Timeline Estimates (Benjamin Todd, Apr 2026)

  • ~25% chance AI that can automate AI R&D is achieved before 2029
  • Trend extrapolation of revenues suggests AI capable of doing a wide range of jobs by 2030
  • Demis Hassabis (DeepMind CEO, early 2026): AGI "could arrive in 5 years"

See also: AI Safety & Interpretability, Dario Amodei

Sources

  • "Do we already have AGI?" — Benjamin Todd (80,000 Hours, Apr 2026) (link)
  • "Levels of AGI" — Legg et al., Google DeepMind (2023) (link)
  • "A definition of AGI" — Bengio et al. (2025) (link)