“What do I mean by “Artificial General Intelligence”?” by Steven Byrnes

In this post, intended for a broad audience, I will paint a brief picture of what I’m talking about when I talk about “AGI”. It will seem obvious to many people, and obviously wrong to many others! So let's jump in:

“AI” as most people think of it today

The future “AGI” I’m concerned about

To make AIs better at a task, we need to do R&D—gather more training data, build new training environments, change or scale up the algorithms, etc.—and make a new, better AI.

We can make one AGI design, and we’re done. Many copies of it can autonomously learn to do everything in the global economy—just as many copies of one human brain design, barely changed since the African savannah, built the global economy from scratch.

For example, today, if you want an AI to drive a car, or to control a computer using a mouse, it's a huge project involving dozens of experts working for years to make a new AI. Whereas if you want a human to do the same, you don’t need to do R&D to breed a new subspecies of human! Instead, you just take an ordinary human—basically the same design from [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 20th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nQH2GhkmSmHoCAN8R/what-do-i-mean-by-artificial-general-intelligence

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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