Fundamentals

Artificial General Intelligence

Artificial General Intelligence is a theoretical form of AI that would match or exceed human cognitive abilities across all domains. AGI remains an aspirational goal rather than a current reality in AI research.

Understanding Artificial General Intelligence

Artificial General Intelligence represents the theoretical threshold at which an AI system would possess the cognitive versatility of a human mind, seamlessly transferring skills across disciplines ranging from scientific reasoning to creative expression and social understanding. While artificial narrow intelligence systems have achieved superhuman performance in specific domains like chess, protein folding, and image recognition, they cannot generalize their abilities to unfamiliar tasks without retraining. AGI would fundamentally differ by possessing common-sense reasoning, the ability to learn from a handful of examples, and genuine understanding rather than sophisticated pattern matching. The path toward AGI is debated, with some researchers believing scaling current deep learning approaches with more data and compute will suffice, while others argue that entirely new architectures or paradigms are needed. The implications of achieving AGI are profound, making AI alignment and AI safety research essential to ensure such a system would reliably act in humanity's interest.

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Fundamentals

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Related Fundamentals Terms

AGI

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a hypothetical AI system with human-level cognitive abilities across all intellectual tasks. Unlike narrow AI, AGI would be able to learn, reason, and solve problems in any domain without task-specific training.

AI Winter

An AI winter is a period of reduced funding, interest, and research progress in artificial intelligence. Historical AI winters occurred in the 1970s and late 1980s, often following inflated expectations and undelivered promises.

Algorithm

An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure or set of rules for solving a computational problem. In AI, algorithms define how models learn from data, make predictions, and optimize their performance.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is the broad field of computer science focused on creating systems that can perform tasks requiring human-like intelligence. AI encompasses machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) refers to AI systems designed to perform specific tasks, such as image recognition or language translation. All current AI systems, including large language models, are forms of narrow intelligence.

Artificial Superintelligence

Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is a hypothetical AI that would surpass human intelligence in every cognitive dimension. The prospect of ASI raises profound questions about control, alignment, and the future of humanity.

Dynamic Programming

Dynamic programming is an algorithmic technique that solves complex problems by breaking them into simpler overlapping subproblems. It is used in reinforcement learning, sequence alignment, and optimal control.

Emergent Behavior

Emergent behavior refers to capabilities that appear in large AI models that were not explicitly trained for or predicted. Examples include in-context learning and chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models.