AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
AGI is an AI that could do almost any thinking task as well as a person. It doesn't exist yet, and people disagree on what would count.
AGI, short for artificial general intelligence, is the idea of an AI that can do almost any thinking task a person can, about as well. Today's AI is good at some things and weak at others. An AGI would be good across the board, and could pick up new kinds of work without being built for them.
Several AI companies say their goal is to build it. Nobody has built it yet, and there's no agreed test for when it would count as done.
Why the term comes up
You'll hear AGI in the news, in funding announcements and in arguments about where AI is heading. It's a big idea, so it gets attention. For most marketing decisions, though, it doesn't change much.
The assistants your customers use today are the ones that decide which brands get named. They read web pages, follow rules about which bots may visit, and get facts wrong sometimes. Those are the things you can work on now.
AGI and narrow AI
The AI in today's products is sometimes called narrow AI. It's trained for a range of tasks, like writing, summarising or answering questions, and it can be very good at them. Ask it to do something far outside what it learned, and it falls short.
For example, an assistant can compare three coffee grinders from their reviews in seconds. It can't taste the coffee, and it can't tell you what it'll be like to own the grinder for a year. An AGI, in theory, could reason about that the way a person would.