Artificial General Intelligence, usually referred to as AGI, has been a hot topic since ChatGPT exploded back in 2022. Recently, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis engaged in a war of words with Yann Lecun, a NYU professor and former Meta AI head popularly known as one of the godfathers of AI.
The disagreement started after Yann Lecun appeared on a podcast, saying that the idea behind general intelligence was flawed at best. The Turing Award winner argued that human intelligence is not general but specialises in interacting with the physical world, and what people think about AGI is an illusion.
Lecun went on to say that while people appear versatile, human intelligence isn’t as good as we are unaware and unable to solve all of the problems that come our way. To this, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that Yann was “plain incorrect” and that he was “confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence.”
“The point about generality is that in theory, in the Turing Machine sense, the architecture of such a general system is capable of learning anything computable given enough time and memory (and data), and the human brain (and AI foundation models) are approximate Turing Machines”, Hassabis added.
Hassabis’ point is that while no system can do everything, the limitation does not mean that something like general intelligence cannot exist. As it turns out, the exchange of words between the two AI pioneers also attracted Elon Musk. Resharing Hassabis’ thoughts, Musk said that the DeepMind head is right.
What is the debate around AGI?
According to Yann LeCun, the term Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), often used by AI companies such as OpenAI and Google refers to a hypothetical form of intelligence that could rival or even surpass the collective intelligence of humans. If AGI were ever achieved, such a system would be capable of solving entirely new problems, adapting to unfamiliar situations, and improvising in real time, rather than relying solely on patterns learned from its training data.
However, LeCun argues that today’s AI systems are nowhere near this level. While current chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can handle complex tasks and even pass highly challenging exams, they still lack true human-level intelligence. Their abilities remain narrow and task-specific, falling short of the flexibility, understanding, and real-world adaptability that define human cognition.
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