Cheat Sheet
What is AGI?
It’s the holy grail of AI – but as Steve Cassidy explains, businesses shouldn’t wait for artificial general intelligence
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Is this just another label for the same old AI hype?
Well, yes and no. If you ask a passerby in the street what AI means to them, their answer might in fact be a definition of AGI – short for artificial general intelligence. The term refers to an AI that’s so broad and versatile that it can mimic the intelligence and functions of a human. To be clear, though, a genuine AGI wouldn’t be just a dumb copycat – it would be a free-thinking entity in its own right.
How does this differ from the various types of AI we have today?
The idea of emulating organic intelligences is a fundamental step beyond the workings of ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Natural systems learn by gaining and losing connections in a neural network. This is the only way it happens, and it doesn’t take many neuron-like structures to make a very effective decision-making system. One famous example is the Nematode Worm, which doesn’t really have anything like a brain at all, but uses a total of 302 neurons to execute all the usual objectives of a living thing, from eating, eliminating, fighting and running away to reproducing and raising offspring.