Core concepts

AGI

Artificial General Intelligence — a hypothetical AI that matches or exceeds human ability across virtually any intellectual task.

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In plain English

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) refers to AI that can understand, learn, and reason across the full range of tasks a person can do — not just one narrow domain. Today's most capable models are excellent at specific things (writing, coding, image generation), but they're not AGI.

What "general" means:

Transferable — solves problems it wasn't trained on
Adaptive — figures out new tools and environments without retraining
Self-directed — sets its own subgoals to achieve a broader objective

Why it's debated: Definitions vary widely. Some labs claim current models are "AGI-adjacent"; others say true AGI is decades away. There's no agreed test — the Turing Test is no longer considered sufficient.

When AI tools market themselves as "AGI-powered," they almost always mean they use a frontier LLM, not that they have achieved general intelligence.

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LLM

Large Language Model — the type of AI behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude, trained to understand and generate text.

Foundation Model

A large, general-purpose AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted (via prompting or fine-tuning) to many downstream tasks.

Alignment

The challenge of making AI systems behave in ways that match human values and intentions — not just their literal instructions.

Back to glossaryLast reviewed May 2026