‘Artificial General Intelligence’ Is Apparently Coming. What Is It?

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🗓️ 16 January 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

For years, AI companies have said that AGI is coming soon. But what does the term mean, and what is the science behind it?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener supported, WNYC Studios.
0:11.2	This is Science Friday.
0:13.5	I'm Ira Plato.
0:14.8	And I'm Flora Lichten.
0:16.2	Today in the podcast, tech companies are in a race to create AGI, artificial general intelligence. But what does
0:23.5	that actually mean? I'm not fond of the term because it is so ill-defined. If you're not familiar
0:33.2	with AGI, that's what we're going to do. We're going to try to get you in the loop. Let's start.
0:39.1	Open AI is an organization founded in 2015. It makes the chatbot chat GPT. It has also said that its
0:47.1	founding goal was to build AGI. That is a system that according to the founders, quote, benefits all of humanity and gives everyone
0:56.7	incredible new capabilities. Others in the field, like DeepMind co-founder Demis Hasabas,
1:03.6	have called AGI, quote, a system that should be able to do pretty much any cognitive
1:08.8	tasks that humans can do. On the other hand, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
1:14.1	said, AGI would, quote, matter much less than people think. So which is it? Will AGI elevate all of
1:21.7	humanity? Or will it end up not mattering that much? And just what is artificial general intelligence supposed to
1:29.8	mean anyhow? A lot to unpack here. Who better to answer these questions than someone who
1:35.6	researchers the intersection of machine and human intelligence? That would be Dr. Melanie Mitchell,
1:41.7	professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, where she
1:45.6	researches cognition in artificial intelligence and machine systems.
1:50.0	Welcome back to Science Friday.
1:51.3	Been a while.
1:52.5	Yeah, thanks for having me.
1:54.2	Nice to have you back.
	...

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