Artificial general intelligence is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Unlike narrow AI systems confined to well-defined tasks, an AGI system can generalize knowledge and transfer skills between domains without task-specific reprogramming.
Modern AI research began in the mid-1950s when researchers believed artificial general intelligence was possible within just a few decades. Herbert A. Simon wrote in 1965 that machines would be capable of doing any work a man could do within twenty years.
The Turing Test involves a human judge engaging in natural language conversations with both a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. In 2025 a pre-registered study showed GPT-4.5 was judged to be human in 73% of five-minute text conversations surpassing the 67% humanness rate of real confederates.
Four polls conducted in 2012 and 2013 suggested that the median estimate among experts for when they would be 50% confident AGI would arrive was between 2040 and 2050 depending on the poll with the mean being 2081. Demis Hassabis said in May 2023 that he expects AGI within a decade or even a few years.
John Searle coined the term strong AI in 1980 stating that an artificial intelligence system can have a mind and consciousness while the weak AI hypothesis states that an artificial intelligence system can only act like it thinks and has a mind and consciousness. Mainstream AI focuses on how a program behaves rather than whether it actually has a mind since if the program can behave as if it has a mind there is no need to know if it actually has one.