AI'S FUTURE COULD BE 'OPEN-SOURCE' OR CLOSED.TECH GIANTS ARE DIVIDED AS THEY LOBBY REGULATORS

There's a race underway to build artificial general intelligence, a futuristic vision of machines that are as broadly smart as humans or at least can do many things as well as people can.

Achieving such a concept-commonly referred to as AGI — is the driving mission of ChatGPTmaker OpenAl and a priority for the elite research wings of tech giants Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft.

It's also a cause for concern for world governments. Leading AI scientists published research Thursday in the journal Science warning that unchecked AI agents with “longterm planning" skills could pose an existential risk to humanity.

But what exactly is AGI and how will we know when it's been attained? Once on the fringe of computer science, it's now a buzzword that's being constantly redefined by those trying to make it happen.

WHAT IS AGI?

Not to be confused with the similar-sounding generative Al― which describes the AI systems behind the crop of tools that "generate" new documents, images and sounds - artificial general intelligence is a more nebulous idea.

It's not a technical term but "a serious, though ill-defined, concept," said Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering AI scientist who's been dubbed a "Godfather of Al." "I don't think there is agreement on what the term means," Hinton said by email this week.

"I use it to mean AI that is at least as good as humans at nearly all of the cognitive things that humans do."

Hinton prefers a different term — superintelligence — “for AGIs that are better than humans.”

A small group of early proponents of the term AGI were looking to evoke how mid-20th century computer scientists envisioned an intelligent machine. That was before AI research branched into subfields that advanced specialized and commercially viable versions of the technology — from face recognition to speech-recognizing voice assistants like Siri and Alexa.