Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a term used to describe a hypothetical intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that a human can do. The term was first coined by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in the 1950s. He envisioned a machine that could think and reason like a human, and he called it the “thinking machine”.

For those out of loop it seems like AGI is a new concept chased by bunch of recent startups and big tech companies. The primary goal of their AI research is to find/create AGI. ¹

AI Winter

The term “AI winter” refers to several periods of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research, following cycles of high expectations and subsequent disappointment. The first major AI winter occurred in the 1970s when the U.S. and British governments significantly cut funding for AI research after the failure of machine translation projects and unfulfilled promises about general-purpose AI. The field had created unrealistic expectations about machines being able to fully understand human language and solve complex problems within a few years.

A second AI winter hit in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the market for specialized AI hardware collapsed and many AI companies went out of business. This downturn was triggered by the limitations of expert systems - programs designed to solve complex problems by mimicking human expertise - which proved too brittle and expensive to maintain in practice. These systems couldn’t learn or adapt to new situations, highlighting the gap between narrow AI applications and true machine intelligence.

For context, this is a timeline form wikipedia ²:

• 1966: failure of machine translation
• 1969: criticism of perceptrons (early, single-layer artificial neural networks)
• 1971–75: DARPA’s frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University
• 1973: large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the Lighthill report
• 1973–74: DARPA’s cutbacks to academic AI research in general
• 1987: collapse of the LISP machine market
• 1988: cancellation of new spending on AI by the Strategic Computing Initiative
• 1990s: many expert systems were abandoned
• 1990s: end of the Fifth Generation computer project’s original goals