Artificial General Intelligence: The Future is Here!

AGI is currently the next major milestone in the ongoing race toward increasingly advanced AI, a race in which major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek (to name just a few) are actively competing. There are many definitions of AGI, and the research community has yet to settle on a single, definitive one. However, I would like to bring the attention on two particular definitions.

The first defines AGI as an artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds human cognitive capabilities. This would be an intelligence not only skilled in generating images, writing code, or crafting stories, but also capable of human-level reasoning and adaptability. For example, today’s ChatGPT can handle tasks lasting up to about an hour before losing coherence. AGI, on the other hand, would be able to reason and carry out tasks indefinitely without such limitations.

Today, AI is learning to reason at a speed that allows it to double the length of the task it can “pay attention to” every 7 months. At this rhythm it will be able to work for 8 hours straight in 21 months, less than 2 years, that is 2027. 8 hours is a sort of landmark because it's the length of a human workday. Assuming the speed will not increase, 35 months later it will be able to focus for an entire working month. That's 5 years from now.

The second definition, though, is the interesting one and is the one that is pondered upon in one of the podcasts I suggest in the section Industry News below. That definition describes AGI as an AI capable of fully replacing any human activity performed in front of a screen.

That’s powerful and worth reflecting over for a moment. Basically it says that in 2030 we will witness an AI capable of doing the work that could be done by a human being behind a screen for an entire month. Keep in mind also that when we’re talking about “AI work” we mean work done at the speed of an AI, not that of a human.

We could chose to worry, if not panic, and begin thinking how we can corral this tsunami, how can we limit the use of AI or how can we protect the work of millions of people from being displaced by AI. But I don’t think that would be the best use of our time. A research poll from Gallup found that only 21% of employees, globally, are engaged at work. That means that around 79% of the workforce are probably delighted by the fact that, finally, a machine will be able to free them from the shackles of the offices in which they work.

Therefore, maybe the time has come for us to begin thinking something new. New jobs, new creative ideas, projects, tasks that we could finally dedicate ourselves to professionally now that there is “something” else that can do the jobs we don’t want to do.

This is how powerful and stimulating are the times in which we’re living. We can create new services, new products, new jobs and even a new society if we want to. The real question, therefore, becomes “do we want to?” or are we afraid to change that much?

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