Challenges on the Path to AGI
Since 1956 one of the central goals of AI is achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Recently we have seen amazing advances in AI, but there are still important challenges to solve before we get there. In this article, I draw on the AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel report to outline what the AI community sees as the critical gaps that must be resolved before AGI can be achieved. AI is in a strange place right now. New benchmark results can make it seem as if the field is nearly solved. Yet these systems still fail basic common-sense tasks that humans manage with little effort. That gap is why true AGI still feels a long way off. In this article, AGI means an AI that can perform as well as a human across a wide variety of tasks, not just produce fluent text. The big problem is what researchers call the "Reasoning Paradox." Today's Large Language Models (LLMs) are very good at producing language that sounds like reasoning, but that is not the same as reliable for...