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Xinmei Shen

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s declaration that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has arrived following the release of OpenAI’s latest model, Astra, has ignited debate over whether AI’s holy grail is now reality.
As China races to close the gap with the US, leading Chinese AI companies are declaring their ambitions to pursue AGI, even as Beijing appears to maintain a cautious stance towards the concept.
Here is a primer on what AGI means, where top Chinese AI developers stand, and how Chinese policymakers view the technology.
What is AGI?
There is no single definition for AGI, though it broadly refers to systems that match or surpass human-level intelligence.
First coined by US physicist Mark Gubrud in 1997, the term was popularised in the 2000s by computer scientists Ben Goertzel – author of the book Artificial General Intelligence – and Shane Legg, co-founder of Google DeepMind.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have triggered new efforts to define it.
A widely cited paper in December by researchers – including Dan Hendrycks from the Center for AI Safety and Dawn Song from the University of California, Berkeley – defined AGI as AI matching the “versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult” across 10 cognitive components, such as reading and reasoning.
Google DeepMind researchers argued in March that existing definitions “failed to cover the full breadth of human cognition”, proposing a 10-faculty framework evaluated against human perception, problem solving, social cognition and other abilities.

Has AGI been achieved?
Experts remain sharply divided.
While scholars like University of California, San Diego’s Eddy Keming Chen and Mikhail Belkin argued in February that current LLMs already displayed the flexible, general competence characteristic of human thought, many view Huang’s declaration as premature.
Researchers including Hendrycks noted that while current models were “far smarter” at specific tasks, they lacked essential cognitive capabilities.
Critical prerequisites such as long-term memory and continuous learning remained missing in deployed systems, according to Alvin Wang Graylin, digital fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centred AI.
“Jensen Huang’s declaration tells us more about Nvidia’s order book than the state of the AI industry,” Graylin said.
Technology analyst Ben Thompson wrote out on Tuesday that models still did not continuously self-learn.
Are Chinese AI labs pushing for AGI?
Top executives across China’s leading AI firms have made AGI their explicit objective.
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng told potential investors in a private meeting in May that “increasing the probability of achieving AGI” was his top priority, citing “keeping costs low for users” as a key strategy for reaching that goal.
Z.ai founder Tang Jie pledged in an internal letter in July to prioritise AGI over near-term commercialisation, defining AGI as the “aggregation of all human intelligence”. MiniMax founder and CEO Yan Junjie vowed in July to forgo his salary until the company achieves AGI.
In a podcast discussion in 2024, Moonshot founder Yang Zhilin framed AGI as a high-stakes “moonshot” goal, while Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – said last year it saw an “increasingly clear trajectory” from AI agents to AGI and superintelligence.

How does Beijing view AGI?
While China’s 15th five-year plan published in March mentioned “exploring development paths for general artificial intelligence”, analysts have cautioned against equating Beijing’s terminology with Silicon Valley’s definition of AGI.
Kyle Chan, a fellow at Brookings Institution, noted in a February article that Chinese authorities used the term to mean “general-purpose AI” rather than human-surpassing autonomous intelligence.
“Policy is organised around technology diffusion, open-source weights and sovereign compute,” Graylin said. AGI was “not the North Star for the AI community in China the way it is in Silicon Valley”, Jacob Stokes, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, wrote in a report last month.
Beijing’s focus remained on risk mitigation and state control. At the World AI Conference in Shanghai in July, President Xi Jinping reiterated that AI must be safe, secure and under human control.


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A primer on what AGI means, where top Chinese AI developers stand, and how Chinese policymakers view the technology


A primer on what AGI means, where top Chinese AI developers stand, and how Chinese policymakers view the technology.


What is AGI? How China’s AI firms are catching up as OpenAI Astra sparks debate

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A primer on what AGI means, where top Chinese AI developers stand, and how Chinese policymakers view the technology

What is AGI?

A primer on what AGI means, where top Chinese AI developers stand, and how Chinese policymakers view the technology