The road to artificial general intelligence spans three key developments: current AI capabilities, the path to AGI, and the potential leap to superintelligence.

Today’s artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) excels at specific tasks but fails at simple problems humans solve easily. As Sam Altman of OpenAI notes, AGI-like properties are “coming into view,” while Dario Amodei of Anthropic predicts some form of “powerful AI” could emerge as early as 2026^[1].

The path to AGI involves three main approaches: reverse engineering the human brain, simulating evolution through genetic algorithms, and creating self-improving AI systems. Hardware advances are keeping pace - by 2025, affordable computers may match human-level processing power of 10 quadrillion calculations per second^[2].

Once AGI emerges, an “intelligence explosion” could quickly follow through recursive self-improvement, potentially leading to artificial superintelligence (ASI) thousands of times smarter than humans. This superintelligent AI would have unprecedented capabilities, from controlling matter at the atomic level to potentially solving humanity’s greatest challenges^[2:1].