AGI is suddenly a dinner table topic

First, let's get the pesky business of defining AGI out of the way. In practice, it's a deeply hazy and changeable term shaped by the researchers or companies set on building the technology. But it usually refers to a future AI that outperforms humans on cognitive tasks. Which humans and which tasks we're talking about makes all the difference in assessing AGI's achievability, safety, and impact on labor markets, war, and society. That's why defining AGI, though an unglamorous pursuit, is not pedantic but actually quite important, as illustrated in a new paper published this week by authors from Hugging Face and Google, among others.