Most people probably won’t notice when artificial general intelligence arrives

When AGI arrives, most won’t even realize it, some AI experts say. Others say it’s already here.

AI is advancing rapidly, but most people might not immediately notice its impact on their lives.

Take OpenAI’s latest o1 models, which the company officially released on Thursday as part of its Shipmas campaign. OpenAI says these models are “designed to spend more time thinking before they respond.”

Some say o1 shows how we might reach artificial general intelligence — a still theoretical form of AI that meets or surpasses human intelligence — without realizing it.

“Models like o1 suggest that people won’t generally notice AGI-ish systems that are better than humans at most intellectual tasks, but which are not autonomous or self-directed,” Wharton professor and AI expert Ethan Mollick wrote in a post on X. “Most folks don’t have a lot of tasks that bump up against limits of human intelligence, so won’t see it.”

Artificial general intelligence has been broadly defined as anything between “god-like intelligence” and a more modest “machine that can do any task better than a human,” Mollick wrote in a May post on his Substack, One Useful Thing.

He said that humans can better understand whether they’re encountering AGI by breaking its development into tiers, in which the ultimate tier, Tier 1, is a machine capable of performing any task better than a human. Tier 2, or “Weak AGI,” he wrote, are machines that outperform average human experts at all tasks in specific jobs — though no such systems currently exist. Tier 3, or “Artificial Focused Intelligence,” is an AI that outperforms average human experts in specific, intellectually demanding tasks. While Tier 4, “Co-intelligence,” is the result of humans and AI working together.

Some in the AI industry believe we’ve already reached AGI, even if we haven’t realized it.

“In my opinion, we have already achieved AGI and it’s even more clear with o1. We have not achieved ‘better than any human at any task,’ but what we have is ‘better than most humans at most tasks,'” Vahid Kazemi, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, wrote in a post on X on Friday.

More conservative AI experts say o1 is just a step along the journey to AGI.

“The idea somehow which, you know, is popularized by science fiction and Hollywood that, you know, somehow somebody is going to discover the secret, the secret to AGI, or human-level AI, or AMI, whatever you want to call it. And then, you know, turn on a machine, and then we have AGI. That’s just not going to happen,” Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said on Lex Fridman’s podcast in March. “It’s not going to be an event. It’s going to be gradual progress.”