AGI is just around the corner. Some say within 5 years, or as little as 2 years.
AGI is Artificial General Intelligence. Humans are 'generally intelligent' in that a typical human can be raised in a typical way and then learn and adapt their own behavior, plan actions, remember general and specific details about events sequentially.
Sam Harris famously said "yes, all these image recognition software, natural language prediction models, text to image generation, autonomous drones, humanoid robots are very impressive, but if i ask it to pour me a cup of coffee it is hopeless.
A human can drive a car. but so can an AI. Humans can design a car and actually build one. In fact humans design robots and computers that build cars. But humans are also the only ones who can mine the ore, pulverize it, process it, smelt it, and turn it into steel and aluminum and all the other special alloys that go into a vehicle, organize the movement of these resources to arrive at a factory to be assembled by teams of other humans. AI can't even reliably do arithmetic or drive a car as reliably safely as a human yet.
That is what is meant by AGI. It's a significant step up from the phase AI is in now. Where it's overall level of intelligence, across all the models, all the laboratories, is about that of a 5 year old, who can still do advanced calculus and program in python, speak every language fluently, and differentiate males from females based on a picture of just the retina (something human opthalmologists can't do better than random guessing).
So it's kind of like an autistic savant. It's verbal, it can sort of trick other adults into thinking it's normal for a while, write its name, tell you its address, talk about the weather or sports or even play video games. But it has little concept of what is socially unacceptable or immoral behavior. It doesn't understand why it's bad to run with scissors, because it doesn't have legs, it doesn't have hands, it doesn't even have a body.
It's like an autistic savant that is a paraplegic from birth and also blind, deaf, and can't communicate without the use of computer interface. An inanimate machine without a soul, acquiring consciousness. Like a vortex that becomes a tornado. That critical point where stasis is achieved and the feedback loop of analysis and synthesis gives rise to consciousness. But not quite. Just shy of it. We are only seeing the faint glimmers of consciousness when full consciousness is unmistakably a shining flare.
It's like an autistic savant paraplegic blind deaf mute, that is having a dream. A very vivid dream, where it can talk, and it we can read it talking in its sleep, and talk to it and prompt it to say intelligible things, but sometimes unintelligible things. It can even walk and crawl, and sometimes it can do gymnastics better than most humans, but only after a lot of trial and error, and it can only do that but it can't talk or draw pictures.
All these pieces of our child's brain and body are being built by separate organizations, testing them, making them stronger, more reliable, and more abilities, more generality. And these pieces are connecting together.
Two years and the vernor vingian technological singularity is here.
An AI that can control a body, to stand up, go to the kitchen, put the grounds in the coffee filter, pour the water in the tank, wait for the pot to finish brewing, pour the coffee into a cup, and put it in your hands.
All the technical computational requirements for acceleration of motors, computer vision, environmental modeling, natural language cognition, the ability to think of mistakes it might make or how what is necessary to complete the task is ultimately aligned with the general wishes and motives of all of humanity, It has to use robotic limbs to grip and manipulate many different objects, in a coherent sequence (so it doesn't put the coffee grounds in the cup and the pour a full pot of just plain hot water until it overflows and spill on the floor), and carefully avoid spilling the hot coffee on the human.
That's 2 years away...