How Long Until Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to AI systems with broad, human-level cognitive abilities: the capacity to reason, learn, and adapt across a wide range of tasks, not just a narrow domain like playing chess or recognizing faces. Some prefer to talk about human level intelligence.

For decades, AGI was always “20 to 30 years away.” (see Armstrong & Sotala, 2015 below.) But that horizon is now collapsing. With breakthroughs in deep learning, transformer architectures, massive compute, and scaled training data, we are at a genuine inflection point. Some credible forecasts, including those in AI 2027’s scenario on the right side of the picture (source: https://ai-2027.com/), suggest AGI could emerge within 2 to 5 years based on current scaling trends.

Why Does This Matter?
The implications are profound, not just for productivity or economic competition, but for global stability and security. The AI 2027 scenario envisions a rapid escalation of the AI race into a geopolitical arms race. But AGI isn’t just another step in automation. It’s a general-purpose, self-improving technology with:
– Exponential diffusion speed
– Minimal barriers to access and deployment
– Potential for decentralization, making it difficult to regulate or contain

In an unstable, multipolar world, the risks go well beyond misinformation or job displacement. They include:
– Autonomous warfare
– AI-enabled bioweapon development via synthetic biology
– Mass surveillance and totalitarian control at scale

Unlike nuclear weapons, AGI could be invisible, distributed, and entirely software-based—making containment vastly more difficult, yet potentially just as dangerous. AGI is no longer a distant hypothetical. It’s a strategic, ethical, and existential challenge of our time.

Governments, companies, and societies must urgently begin preparing for the capabilities, consequences, and governance of AGI. The hardest part, in Kai-Fu Lee’s words: “I had hoped that [the US and China] would work together to advance AI for good. In reality, this was wishful thinking.”
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