How do you certify AGI?

The race toward artificial general intelligence has a problem: there is no test, no certificate, and no agreed definition of the finish line.

Can we certify what we cannot inspect? The challenge of verifying AGI. (Visualization by Slava Polonski)

TL;DR: We are racing toward AGI without agreeing on what would prove we’ve reached it. There is no stable definition, no benchmark that survives the pace of progress, and no reliable way to inspect what happens inside frontier models. As researchers increasingly warn about the jump from AGI to ASI, that Certification Gap is becoming a problem we may not have the luxury of solving after the fact.

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The AGI certification problem

Every major AI lab now treats artificial general intelligence as a delivery date, not a philosophy seminar. OpenAI’s founding charter is organized around it. Google DeepMind publishes formal frameworks for measuring progress toward it. And the money follows the conviction: by Stuart Russell’s count, the world is spending ten times what the Manhattan Project cost and a hundred times the price of the Large Hadron Collider, roughly 500 billion dollars so far, to build machines that match or exceed human intelligence across the board.