This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Boris Burakovski
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, but Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is something entirely different. While AI powers chatbots, image generators, and recommendation engines, it remains narrow—trained for specific tasks. AGI, by contrast, refers to a still-hypothetical system capable of understanding and performing any intellectual task a human can. Yet despite growing attention, AGI has no single agreed-upon definition. What exactly qualifies as “general” intelligence? And how close are we to achieving it? Below are some influential quotes that attempt to define what AGI really means.
6 Definitions
“AGI is a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”
— OpenAI Charter, 2018“AGI would be a system that is able to perform human-level reasoning, understanding, and accomplishing of complicated tasks”
— Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist of Google, 2016“AGI is a system that can generalize knowledge across different domains and exhibit the versatility of human intelligence.”
— Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET, 2014“There is no such thing as AGI. Even human intelligence is very specialized.”
— Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, 2023“AGI is a hypothetical stage in the development of machine learning (ML) in which an artificial intelligence (AI) system can match or exceed the cognitive abilities of human beings across any task”
— IBM Research, 2023“AGI is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.”
— Wikipedia, 2025
6 Perspectives
“AGI will be the most important technological development in human history.”
— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, 2023“In the long run, AGI may be the last invention humans need to make.”
— Nick Bostrom, Philosopher at Oxford University, 2014“With artificial general intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”
— Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, 2014“Fearing AGI is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”
— Andrew Ng, Co-founder of Google Brain, 2017“The first AGI might be the last invention we ever make, if we do not get it right.”
— Nick Bostrom, Philosopher at Oxford University, 2014“AGI could be the most powerful technology ever invented.”
— Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, 2023
6 Predictions
“We will have human-level AI by 2029.”
— Ray Kurzweil, Futurist and Google Director of Engineering, 2005“AGI could come in a few years—or it could take decades.”
— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, 2023“AI could be smarter than humans in 5 to 20 years.”
— Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather of AI”, 2023“I think AGI might already be here. We just haven’t recognized it yet.”
— Blake Lemoine, Former Google engineer, 2022“We don’t know how to build AGI yet, and we may still be missing fundamental pieces.”
— Yoshua Bengio, Deep learning pioneer, 2023“The transition to AGI will require not just new models but new ideas entirely.”
— Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder of OpenAI, 2023
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Boris Burakovski