A history of definitions of powerful AI

I made this timeline as supporting research for this essay: AGI (disambiguation). Excerpted:

This is a timeline of how visions of AGI and powerful AI have shifted over the past ~75 years, from the fathers of computing to today's frontier labs.

On net, definitions have inched toward the measurable, practical, and achievable; emphasizing an AI's performance—especially vis-a-vis human benchmarks, on human jobs—over internal "consciousness" or "agency," recursive self-improvement, or the ability to generalize to any new task or environment.

Ultimately, AGI is better understood through the lens of faith, field-building, and ingroup signaling than as a concrete technical milestone. AGI represents an ambition and an aspiration; a Schelling point, a shibboleth. The AGI-pilled share the belief that we will soon build machines more capable than ourselves—that humans won't retain our hegemony on intelligence for long. The specifics aren't important: it's a feeling of existential weight.