General AI, sometimes called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or strong AI, refers to a hypothetical AI system capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across any intellectual task a human can perform, rather than excelling narrowly at one specific job. It stands in direct contrast to the narrow AI that exists today, which performs well within a defined domain, translation, image recognition, code generation, but cannot transfer that competence to unrelated tasks.
No AI system currently qualifies as general in this sense; even the most capable large language models remain narrow AI in the strict definition, since their apparent versatility comes from broad training across many tasks rather than a genuine, human-like general reasoning capacity. General AI remains a long-term research goal and a subject of active debate, both on how it might be achieved and on what safety and alignment work would be required before deploying a system with that level of capability.
