Tech companies want to build artificial general intelligence. But who decides when AGI is attained?

There’s a race underway to build artificial general intelligence, a futuristic vision of machines that are as broadly smart as humans or at least can do many things as well as people can. “This really needs a community’s effort and attention so that mutually we can agree on some sort of classifications of AGI,” said workshop organizer Jiaxuan You, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. San Francisco company OpenAI has given its nonprofit board of directors — whose members include a former U.S. Treasury secretary — the responsibility of deciding when its AI systems have reached the point at which they “outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” “The board determines when we’ve attained AGI,” says OpenAI’s own explanation of its governance structure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company’s long-term goal was “building full general intelligence” that would require advances in reasoning, planning, coding and other cognitive abilities. In deciding between an “old-school AI institute” or one whose “goal is to build AGI” and has sufficient resources to do so, many would choose the latter, said You, the University of Illinois researcher.