Science

If you take even a passing interest in artificial intelligence, you will inevitably have come across the notion of artificial general intelligence. AGI, as it is often known, has ascended to buzzword status over the past few years as AI has exploded into the public consciousness on the back of the success of large language models (LLMs), a form of AI that powers chatbots such as ChatGPT. That is largely because AGI has become a lodestar for the companies at the vanguard of this type of technology. ChatGPT creator OpenAI, for example, states that its mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”. Governments, too, have become obsessed with the opportunities AGI might present, as well as possible existential threats, while the medi...

It can be hard to wrap our minds round the very large and the very small. Ron Koeberer/Millennium Images, UK Imagine setting off on a spacecraft that can travel at the speed of light. You won’t get far. Even making it to the other side of the Milky Way would take 100,000 years. It is another 2.5 million years to Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbour. And there are some 2 trillion galaxies beyond that. The vastness of the cosmos defies comprehension. And yet, at the fundamental level, it is made of tiny particles.”It is a bit of a foreign country – both the small and the very big,” says particle physicist Alan Barr at the University of Oxford. “I don’t think you ever really understand it, you just get used to it.” Still, you need to have some grasp of scale to have ...