What is AGI? How China’s AI firms are catching up as OpenAI Astra sparks debate

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s declaration that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has arrived following the release of OpenAI’s latest model, Astra, has ignited debate over whether AI’s holy grail is now reality.

As China races to close the gap with the US, leading Chinese AI companies are declaring their ambitions to pursue AGI, even as Beijing appears to maintain a cautious stance towards the concept.

Here is a primer on what AGI means, where top Chinese AI developers stand, and how Chinese policymakers view the technology.

What is AGI?

There is no single definition for AGI, though it broadly refers to systems that match or surpass human-level intelligence.

First coined by US physicist Mark Gubrud in 1997, the term was popularised in the 2000s by computer scientists Ben Goertzel – author of the book Artificial General Intelligence – and Shane Legg, co-founder of Google DeepMind.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have triggered new efforts to define it.

A widely cited paper in December by researchers – including Dan Hendrycks from the Center for AI Safety and Dawn Song from the University of California, Berkeley – defined AGI as AI matching the “versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult” across 10 cognitive components, such as reading and reasoning.