What is AGI?
Discover the tech that offers unlimited potential and takes intelligence to another level
If you think a robot playing chess is impressive, you ain’t seen nothing yet…
The term Artificial General
Intelligence (AGI) was coined by a physicist called Mark Gubrud in an article about military technologies back in 1997. Since then, it’s been defined in many different ways but, broadly speaking, it describes a generally intelligent machine possessing cognitive capabilities rivalling those of humans across a wide range of tasks.
In other words, AGI is super smart and cleverer than the AI we’re using today by quite some distance. So while you can get AI to perform specific tasks – often dubbed ‘narrow’ or ‘weak’ – such as playing chess, creating an image, aiding a healthcare diagnosis or finding information online based on large volumes of training data, AGI is capable of thinking for itself.
“AGI is ‘strong artificial intelligence’, as opposed to the ‘weak AI’ we have right now which is good at very narrow or specific tasks,” Professor Kevin Pimbblet, director for the Centre of Excellence for Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Modelling at the University of Hull tells MacFormat. “AGI is the equivalent or greater than human intelligence.”