Artificial general intelligence (AGI) names an AI able to match or exceed humans at most cognitive tasks, in contrast with "narrow" AI that does one thing well, such as playing Go or translating (M. Mitchell, 2019, ch. 3). Mark Gubrud used the term in 1997, and Shane Legg and Ben Goertzel popularized it in the early 2000s, but the ambition is as old as the field: in 1970 Marvin Minsky predicted that "in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being" (Chollet, 2021, sec. 1.1.7).
In San Francisco, AGI is at once a research program, a commercial promise and a contract clause. OpenAI's Charter (2018) defines it as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work: a market criterion, not a cognitive one. According to The Information (December 2024), the contract with Microsoft further tied it to generating $100 billion in profits, perhaps the most operational definition in the history of philosophy of mind. Google DeepMind proposed grading it in "levels" of performance and generality (Morris et al., 2024), and a Microsoft Research report claimed to see its first glimmers in GPT-4 (sparks of AGI) (Bubeck et al., 2023). The song turns it into a pickup line: "I see sparks of AGI in your eyes" (osmarks, n.d.).
The objections target the G. Is there such a thing as general intelligence, or only a cluster of skills? Mitchell quotes a telling formula: a pile of narrow intelligences never adds up to a general intelligence, because what matters is integration (M. Mitchell, 2019, ch. 3). Chollet recalls that, by the No Free Lunch theorem, nothing is general in an absolute sense; human intelligence may be broad but ad hoc, which would make AI an anthropocentric enterprise (Chollet, 2019, sec. II.1.2) (see measuring intelligence). And then there are the moving goalposts: each achievement stops counting as "real" intelligence as soon as it is reached, a charge Santelli (2026) reports against the last defenders of in-principle objections, such as Gary Marcus.