I keep hearing about 'AGI.' How is that different from the AI we use now?

The AI we use now is narrow. It's a specialist. AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, would be a generalist. Think of the difference between a calculator and a person. A calculator is amazing at math, far better than you or me. But ask it to write a poem or tell you if a cat looks grumpy, and it's useless. That's current AI — brilliant at its one trained task, whether that's generating images or writing code. AGI doesn't exist yet. It's a concept. It would be a single system that could learn, understand, and apply its intelligence to any problem, just like a human can. You could ask it to plan your budget, then switch gears and have it learn a new board game with you. Recently, tech pioneer John Carmack announced he's starting a new venture to work on this exact problem, which shows how serious the pursuit is. But here's a tip: don't hold your breath. We are likely decades away, if it's even possible. A lot of hype comes from calling a really good chatbot 'intelligent.' It's not. It's a pattern-matching machine. AGI would be a genuine thinking machine, and that's a whole different universe of difficulty.