Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis disagrees with company's co-founder Sergey Brin on this one thing: 'We thought it was...'
Google DeepMind
CEO
Demis Hassabis
holds a more cautious outlook on the arrival of
artificial general intelligence
(AGI) than the Alphabet-owned company's co-founder
Sergey Brin
. Currently, AGI's definition is contested, with some focusing on human-level competence across all domains and others on an AI's capacity to learn, adapt and produce autonomous outputs beyond its training data. Despite both having access to similar data and insights into AI development, Hassabis' perspective differs from Brin's. In a recent conversation on the New York Times' Hard Fork podcast, it was noted that Brin expects AGI to arrive before 2030, while Hassabis has predicted that it will happen just after 2030. This difference in forecasts raises questions about how these Google executives may be perceiving differently from the same information. Hassabis also stated that he is sticking to a timeline he has maintained since DeepMind was founded in 2010.
What Demis Hassabis has predicted about the arrival of AGI
Talking at the NYT podcast, Hassabis said:
'We thought it was roughly a 20-year mission, and amazingly, we're on track. It's somewhere around there, I would think.'
The prediction came after Brin jokingly accused Hassabis of 'sandbagging', which is intentionally downplaying timelines to later overdeliver. However, during the interview, Hassabis stood by his reasoning, pointing to the complexity of defining AGI itself.
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"I have quite a high bar. It should be able to do all of the things that the human brain can do, even theoretically. And so that's a higher bar than, say, what the typical individual human could do, which is obviously very economically important,'
Hassabis noted.
When asked whether AGI would emerge through gradual improvements or sudden breakthroughs, Hassabis said both approaches are 'likely necessary.'
'We push unbelievably hard on the scaling,'
he explained, while also funding 'blue sky' research such as
AlphaEvolve
.
Last year, Anthropic CEO
Dario Amodei
predicted that AGI could arrive by 2026 or 2027, though he warned that unforeseen factors might delay its development. Other industry leaders share similar optimism: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested AGI could materialise during Trump's presidency, and Ark Invest's Cathie Wood has argued it could become a major engine of economic growth.
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