When will AI be smarter than humans? Don't ask

The term 'artificial general intelligence' is being bandied about by some of tech's smartest people, but nobody knows what it really means.

- Gideon Lichfield

If you've heard the term artificial general intelligence, or AGI, it probably makes you think of a humanish intelligence, like the honey-voiced AI love interest in the movie Her, or a superhuman one, like Skynet in The Terminator. At any rate, something science-fictional and far off.

But now a growing number of people in the tech industry and even outside it are prophesying AGI or "human-level" AI in the very near future.

These people may believe what they are saying, but it is at least partly hype designed to get investors to throw billions of dollars at AI companies. Yes, big changes are almost certainly on the way, and you should be preparing for them. But for most of us, calling them AGI is at best a distraction and at worst deliberate misdirection. Business leaders and policymakers need a better way to think about what's coming. Fortunately, there is one.

HOW MANY YEARS AWAY?

Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Elon Musk of xAI (the thing he's least famous for) have all said recently that AGI, or something like it, will arrive within a couple of years. More measured voices such as Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and Meta's Yann LeCun see it being at least five to 10 years out. More recently, the meme has gone mainstream, with journalists including the New York Times' Ezra Klein and Kevin Roose arguing that society should get ready for something like AGI in the very near future.

I say "something like" because oftentimes, these people flirt with the term AGI and then retreat to a more equivocal phrasing like "powerful AI". And what they may mean by it varies enormously — from AI that can do almost any individual cognitive task as well as a human but might still be quite specialized (Klein, Roose), to doing Nobel Prize-level work (Amodei, Altman), to thinking like an actual human in all respects (Hassabis), to operating in the physical world (LeCun), or simply being "smarter than the smartest human" (Musk).