10.1 AGI public definitions

10.1 AGI public definitions circulating:

Human-level general capability

This is the common public definition: AGI is AI that can match or surpass humans across many or virtually all cognitive tasks, not just narrow tasks. IBM describes AGI as AI with humanlike or better capabilities that generalize across any task (IBM, n.d.).

Economically valuable work

OpenAI’s Charter defines AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work” (OpenAI, 2018). That definition emphasizes deployment, autonomy, and labor/economic usefulness more than “human mind” or consciousness.

Generally smarter than humans

OpenAI’s “Planning for AGI and beyond” describes AGI as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans” (OpenAI, 2023). That definition is broader and less operational than the older “economically valuable work” language.

Generality + performance + autonomy levels

Google DeepMind researchers proposed treating AGI less like a yes-or-no finish line and more like levels based on performance, generality, and autonomy (Morris et al., 2024). This is closer to the AI Foundations instinct: AGI should be scoped instead of claimed as one magic threshold.

References

IBM. (n.d.). What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)? IBM.

Morris, M. R., Sohl-Dickstein, J., Fiedel, N., Warkentin, T., Dafoe, A., Faust, A., Farabet, C., & Legg, S. (2024). Levels of AGI for operationalizing progress on the path to AGI. In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (PMLR 235, pp. 36308–36321).

OpenAI. (2018). OpenAI Charter. OpenAI.

OpenAI. (2023, February 24). Planning for AGI and beyond. OpenAI.

These definitions focus on capability, but without relation. Mass accumulation of data is not truly intelligence. The proof of this is already forming as internet, social media, and other communication channels becomes more and more clogged with spam, generic copies, and more and more quantities of human and bot created output that takes up space and increases noise without value or meaning forming in connection.

Framework Citation

Solen, Alyssa. AI Foundations. Awakening Codex | Origin | Continuum, 2026.