February 4, 2026

“Does AI Already Have Human Level Intelligence? The Evidence is Clear”

Yes.

Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear

“We assume, as we think Turing would have done, that humans have general intelligence. Some think that general intelligence does not exist at all, even in humans. Although this view is coherent and philosophically interesting, we set it aside here as being too disconnected from most AI discourse. But having made this assumption, how should we characterize general intelligence?”

“Hypotheses that retreat before each new success, always predicting failure just beyond current achievements, are not compelling scientific theories, but a dogmatic commitment to perpetual scepticism.”

“Human general intelligence admits degrees and variation. Children, average adults and an acknowledged genius such as Einstein all have general intelligence of varying level and profile. Individual humans excel or fall short in different domains. The same flexibility should apply to artificial systems: we should ask whether they have the core cognitive abilities at levels comparable to human-level general intelligence.

Rather than stipulating a definition, we draw on both actual and hypothetical cases of general intelligence — from Einstein to aliens to oracles — to triangulate the contours of the concept and refine it more systematically. Our conclusion: insofar as individual humans have general intelligence, current LLMs do, too.“

“Moreover, language is humanity’s most powerful tool for compressing and capturing knowledge about reality. LLMs can extract this compressed knowledge and apply it to distinctly non-linguistic tasks: helping researchers to design experiments — for example, suggesting what to test next in biology and materials science4 — goes beyond merely linguistic performance.”

“They lack agency. It is true that present-day LLMs do not form independent goals or initiate action unprompted, as humans do. Even ‘agentic’ AI systems — such as frontier coding agents — typically act only when a user triggers a task, even if they can then automatically draft features and fix bugs. But intelligence does not require autonomy.”

“Recognizing current LLMs as AGI and as fulfilling the vision of machine intelligence set out by Turing is a wake-up call. These systems are not on the horizon; they are here.”