Can We Build a Better IQ Test for AI?: Progress Toward Artificial General Intelligence has Launched a Raft of New Metrics

Buzzwords in the field of artificial intelligence can be technical: perceptron, convolution, transformer. These refer to specific computing approaches. A recent term sounds more mundane but has revolutionary implications: timeline. Ask someone in AI for their timeline, and they'll tell you when they expect the arrival of AGI—artificial general intelligence—which is sometimes defined as AI technology that can match the abilities of humans at most tasks. As AI's sophistication has scaled—thanks to faster computers, better algorithms, and more data—timelines have compressed. The leaders of major AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, have recently said they expect AGI within a few years. ¶ A computer system that thinks like us would enable close collaboration. Both the immediate and long-term impacts of AGI, if achieved, are unclear, but expect to see changes in the economy, scientific discovery, and geopolitics. And if AGI leads to superintelligence, it may even affect humanity's placement in the predatory pecking order. So it's imperative that we track the technology's progress in preparation for such disruption. Benchmarking AI's capabilities allows us to shape legal regulations, engineering goals, social norms, and business models—and to understand intelligence more broadly.