Artificial general intelligence: Has AI surpassed human cognitive abilities?
OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, recently suggested that its advanced model, known as GPT-6 Astra, could mark the arrival of something called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
If AI itself is often defined as the ability to simulate human intelligence, OpenAI defines AGI as an AI system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work – to be better at the majority of digital and cognitive tasks a human can perform.
This includes tasks such as writing computer code, organisational activities or managing projects.
For now, at least, it excludes work that involves physical labour, such as agriculture or construction. Though the integration of AI with robotics means such sectors of industry may not be the exclusive domain of humans forever.
This definition by OpenAI focuses on breadth of competency by an AI system.
However, other experts maintain that AGI will be characterised by additional cognitive leaps beyond present-day AI models. For example, Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind, has said that AGI should be able to do “pretty much any cognitive task that humans can do”.
This definition makes AGI more about brilliance and a bit less about depth. Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, believes the term AGI itself is flawed and should be replaced by “human-level AI”.
These represent snapshots from a vigorous ongoing debate over when AGI will arrive and how to recognise it.
Venturebeat magazine reported Brockman acknowledging this at a closed press briefing about GPT-6 Astra in September when he said: “When we started OpenAI, we kind of thought that there was going to be this well-defined moment that everyone would recognise … it hasn’t played out like that.”
But he added: “For me personally, I do think we’re there.”
Just a few days after Brockman made his comments, the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, called in an essay titled: “We must pace the frontier” for the AI industry to slow down the pace of its development.
Within hours of this essay being published, both Sam Altman and Elon Musk signalled their agreement.
So is Brockman right about AGI being here? The evidence still points in more than one direction and is therefore inconclusive.
The clearest shift with GPT-6 Astra is in how people use it. Earlier models needed detailed instructions at each step. Astra is built for longer jobs where the user sets a goal and some boundaries, and the model works out the sequence itself.
