What is artificial general intelligence? | Ian Bremmer Explains

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Transcript

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- If you've been listening to AI experts lately, one phrase comes up over and over and over. - AGI, artificial general intelligence.

- AGI. - AGI, whatever you want to call it.

- Super intelligent and AGI.

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- Our goal is to make AGI. - When AGI arrives, you know, I think it's going to change pretty much everything about the way we do things.

- AGI, artificial general intelligence, the technology holy grail, machines that don't just mimic human thinking

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but match and then fast surpass it. But ask those same experts their thoughts on the what and when of AGI, you get a dozen different answers.

Some say it's when a computer can do any intellectual task a human can. Others say it's about transfer learning,

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applying knowledge to different situations. Some say it's 10 years away, others, two.

Today's AI tools can feel very human, at times brilliant. But large language models aren't yet intelligent.

They're highly skilled but narrow.

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They're good at mimicking and matching patterns, trained on tasks like writing code, or generating images and text. Artificial general intelligence is very different.

These are machines that understand, and learn, and adapt like or better than humans. Many LLMs now arguably pass the Turing Test,

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so experts have proposed new goalposts to understand when machines reach human level cognition. Microsoft AI's Mustafa Suleyman says that AGI is when you can hand an AI $100,000 and it turns it into a million on its own.

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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says AGI is when a robot can make coffee in a stranger's kitchen. To understand AGI's potential, imagine you have an apple and you want to make a meal.

Google gives you recipe links. ChatGPT writes a recipe

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in the style of Shakespeare or Taylor Swift. But AGI knows your taste, orders ingredients, hires a cook, and has dinner ready for you when you get home.

Or let's say you ask, how do I turn Uzbekistan into a top 10 global economy?

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AGI laughs a bit and then reads everything ever written about economic development. It builds models, it runs simulations, it factors in demographics, climate, and politics, and crafts a strategy, and starts emailing ministers in Uzbekistan, in Uzbek,

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with a reform plan. That's the difference.

AGI doesn't just tell you the answers, it figures them out like a human strategist, but one who never sleeps, never eats, doesn't waste time scrolling Instagram, and then gets it done. What happens next?

Best case scenario, AGI helps us solve climate change,

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cure cancer, boost productivity, and enter a new golden age where innovation isn't limited by us. Worst case, AGI decides that human beings are inefficient, carbon-based error machines and logically concludes the easiest way to save the planet is to eliminate us.

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We are not yet on the brink of Skynet. We aren't an algorithm away from "The Terminator." Computers still struggle with fundamental human concepts like spatial recognition and sensory perception.

An AGI is also limited by the enormous energy needed to power it.

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But dismissing AGI as science fiction is a mistake because virtually every AI expert out there says that AGI is coming fast. And society is not ready.

The timeline may be fuzzy, but what is certain is that AGI is a technology

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that will redefine intelligence, the rules of power, and with it, our understanding of what it means to be human.