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How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

Large language models such as OpenAI’s o1 have electrified the debate over achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI. But they are unlikely to reach this milestone on their own.

The phrase artificial general intelligence entered the zeitgeist around 2007 after its mention in an eponymously named book edited by AI researchers Ben Goertzel and Cassio Pennachin. This approach has turned out to be highly successful in a wide array of contexts, including generating computer programs to solve problems that are described in natural language, summarizing academic articles and answering mathematics questions. One point in their favour is that the underlying transformer architecture can process and find statistical patterns in other types of information in addition to text, such as images and audio, provided that there is a way to appropriately tokenize those data.

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