What does AGI mean?
Three published meanings of AGI. They are not interchangeable, and none of them is a statute.
AGI is short for artificial general intelligence. Labs and researchers publish different definitions, and a sentence that uses the word often leaves out which one. This page lines up three written meanings and links them. It does not pick a winner, and it does not predict a date.
OpenAI’s charter: most economically valuable work
OpenAI’s charter defines the term inside its mission statement. The mission, the charter says, is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, “by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
That wording has two tests in one clause. “Highly autonomous” is about how much the system acts without a person. “Most economically valuable work” is about the range of paid tasks, not about a single exam. The same charter says the timeline to AGI “remains uncertain.” It also says OpenAI will treat the mission as met if its work helps someone else build safe and beneficial AGI. Those sentences are the charter’s. They are not a product specification, and they do not name a model that OpenAI says has met the bar.
The charter is the document this page uses for OpenAI’s definition. Other OpenAI pages discuss the mission in shorter language. If a news story says OpenAI “reached AGI,” the useful check is whether the company is using this charter sentence or a different one.
A DeepMind paper: levels, not a single finish line
In a 2024 paper, “Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI”, Meredith Ringel Morris, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Noah Fiedel, Tris Warkentin, Allan Dafoe, Aleksandra Faust, Clement Farabet, and Shane Legg, writing with Google DeepMind affiliations, argue for a grid instead of a yes-or-no label. Google DeepMind’s publication page lists the same paper at ICML 2024.
The paper sorts systems by performance, which it calls depth, and by generality, which it calls breadth. A narrow system can be extremely good at one kind of task and still not be general. On the general side, the authors describe a “competent AGI” level as performance at least at the 50th percentile of skilled adults across a wide range of non-physical tasks, including learning new skills. The paper says that level had not been achieved by public systems at the time of writing. It also says no benchmark yet classifies systems against the grid without ambiguity.
That is a research framework from 2024. It is not a 2026 scorecard, and this page is not updating the paper’s examples. The point that still matters for reading the news is the split: a high score on one task is not, in this paper, the same thing as AGI.
Hassabis, in a 2026 interview: a person’s forecast
Demis Hassabis, in a Wall Street Journal Magazine profile by Ben Cohen published October 21, 2026, and carried the same day by Mint, describes AGI as a system with the full cognitive range of a human brain, not a subset of human skills. The Verge reported the timeline in that profile the same afternoon. This desk’s story quotes the profile through those two reports. The Journal page itself did not load when that story was written.
In that interview he says he now expects AGI in two to three years, closer than the three-to-five-year range he was using earlier in 2026. He tells Cohen, “It’s soon. I’m updating nearer and nearer.” Cohen also describes a test Hassabis uses: a system trained only on what humans knew up to 1901, asked to produce Einstein’s 1905 work. Those lines are his forecast and his illustration, not a Google ship date. The profile does not present a benchmark table or a roadmap entry.
A nearby word that is not this one
A Nature comment by Anil Seth, Ned Block, and Giulio Tononi argues that today’s AI is not conscious. The story on that comment treats it as an argument, not a new experiment. Consciousness is not the charter’s economic test, not the DeepMind paper’s performance grid, and not Hassabis’s 1905 illustration. A system could be called AGI under one of those three meanings without anyone having settled whether it is conscious. This page does not take up that argument.
This desk’s reading
Opinion: the three meanings above ask different questions. OpenAI’s charter asks whether a highly autonomous system beats humans at most valuable work. The DeepMind paper asks where a system sits on a grid of skill and breadth, and it refused a single finish line. Hassabis, in one interview, is offering a brain-wide cognitive bar, a personal test, and a shortened forecast. A headline that says AGI is “two to three years away” is reporting his forecast. It is not reporting that the charter’s bar has been met, and it is not a result from the 2024 paper.
Related pages: OpenAI reporting, What is an AI agent?, and the Hassabis story. An agent, in the product posts on this site, is a way of letting a model take steps. That is not the same claim as AGI.
This page is general information, not a forecast and not investment or research advice. See the disclaimer.
Sources
- OpenAI, OpenAI Charter.
- Meredith Ringel Morris and colleagues, Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI, arXiv, with the Google DeepMind publication record for ICML 2024.
- Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal Magazine profile of Demis Hassabis, as carried by Mint on October 21, 2026, and as reported by The Verge.
- Anil Seth, Ned Block, and Giulio Tononi, Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be, Nature. Linked here only to separate consciousness from AGI.