AI vs AGI: Understanding the Profound Difference

Is the meaning of the term "artificial general inteligence" very different from that of the term "artificial inteligence"?

Profoundly.

AGI is effectively a digital person. A hypothetical AGI (they do not exist yet) would exhibit understanding, self reflection, and real time learning.

AI encompasses a range of techniques from what's effectively a huge tree of “if"s (like 20 questions…but with potentially way more questions), to deep neural networks that are trained on billions of examples.

AGI is effectively sapient. "AI" is effectively a digital magic trick that can be useful for some purposes to a point, but that really doesn't understand anything it creates. It can be used to create things, so it's not useless. It's just not a replacement for a human.

AGI is also what would be required for robots to “take over the world.” All of the hype about people losing jobs from AI is still pretty well garbage; with current technology, and for the foreseeable future, we won't be making the jump from AI to AGI.

We know that we don't know enough to make it work, and that the current technology cannot just “become intelligent” by accident. And we don't even know what we don't know about how to actually bridge that gap.

It could happen in ten years. We could still be waiting for AGI in a century.

And we have many varieties of AI today.

That's how different they are.