Tech companies want to build artificial general intelligence. But who decides when AGI is attained?

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There’s a race underway to build artificial general intelligence, a futuristic vision of machines that are broadly as smart as humans or at least can do many things as well as people can

There’s a race underway to build artificial general intelligence, a futuristic vision of machines that are as broadly smart as humans or at least can do many things as well as people can.

Achieving such a concept — commonly referred to as AGI — is the driving mission of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and a priority for the elite research wings of tech giants Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft.

It's also a cause for concern for world governments. Leading AI scientists published research Thursday in the journal Science warning that unchecked AI agents with “long-term planning" skills could pose an existential risk to humanity.

But what exactly is AGI and how will we know when it’s been attained? Once on the fringe of computer science, it’s now a buzzword that’s being constantly redefined by those trying to make it happen.

Not to be confused with the similar-sounding generative AI — which describes the AI systems behind the crop of tools that “generate” new documents, images and sounds — artificial general intelligence is a more nebulous idea.

It's not a technical term but “a serious, though ill-defined, concept,” said Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering AI scientist who's been dubbed a “Godfather of AI.”

“I don't think there is agreement on what the term means,” Hinton said by email this week. “I use it to mean AI that is at least as good as humans at nearly all of the cognitive things that humans do.”

Hinton prefers a different term — superintelligence — “for AGIs that are better than humans.”

A small group of early proponents of the term AGI were