6G and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

McKinsey describes Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as “a theoretical AI system with capabilities that rival those of a human. Many researchers believe we are still decades, if not centuries, away from achieving AGI.”

Wikipedia calls AGI as “a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This is in contrast to narrow AI, which is designed for specific tasks. AGI is considered one of various definitions of strong AI. Creating AGI is a primary goal of AI research and of companies such as OpenAI and Meta.“

In the recently published HuaweiTech 2024 Issue1, the article on ‘AI: The Bridge to 6G’ looks at how 6G and AGI will work together. Quoting from the article:

In the age of AI, the core carrier of applications and services will shift from mobile apps to AI agents. AI agents can sense and proactively take action. Capable of sensing, learning, and acquiring knowledge, they can set action objectives based on the environment and constantly improve their capabilities. The recent success of foundation models has taken AI agent capabilities to a new level, going beyond just generative AI, to creating interactive AI capable of complex dialogues and decision-making. Therefore, in the 6G era, networks will power not only AI agents, but artificial general intelligence (AGI). Huawei’s vision of Connected Intelligence (Figure 1), proposed in 2019, assumed support for native-AI capabilities and involves two aspects: AGI for 6G and 6G for AGI.

This article covers both of these aspects, with a particular focus on 6G for AGI. As shown in Figure 2, 6G for AGI looks to explore areas like how to design communications capabilities like eMBB+, URLLC+, and mMTC+, and how to use networks’ sensing capabilities to better support AI and make 6G into the neural center that connects future AI agents and a key part of AI learning, training, and inference. If 6G is to succeed in these areas, the 6G system needs to be designed with an architecture that expands beyond connectivity and must integrate the four basic functions of AI agents: sensing, cognition, decision-making, and action. This architecture should use efficient, intent-based communications to closely integrate the physical and digital worlds and thus influence how the physical world operates.

The article then goes on to discuss ‘AGI for 6G’ and ‘6G for AGI’ in detail. It then concludes as follows:

In conclusion, we believe that 6G is essentially about integrating communication, AI, and sensing to create a neural center for numerous AI agents. We also believe that the following elements of 6G native-AGI communication will be essential in the future foundation model era:

Connected Intelligence = AGI for 6G + 6G for AGI

AGI for 6G: Effectiveness communication powered by the post-Shannon-model communication architecture
6G for AGI: An inclusive intelligent neural center that integrates AI learning, training, and inference