DeepMind CEO: 'AGI' Is Coming Soon, But Here's the Test It Must Pass First

DeepMind CEO: 'AGI' Is Coming Soon, But Here's the Test It Must Pass First | PCMag

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(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—In an industry overflowing with substance-starved hype, Google’s DeepMind subsidiary has built a reputation for delivering not just attention-getting demonstrations of AI smarts but legit scientific breakthroughs. In 2024, DeepMind researchers won a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for advances in computing protein structures.That made it a little strange to see DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis—one of those Nobel honorees—lead off his part of Google I/O’s opening keynote this week with a profession that “artificial general intelligence is just a few years away.” So-called AGI has been a somewhat vaporous talking point in the business for years, used to justify making engineers work 60-hour weeks, touted as the foundation of a coming technological singularity, or cited as something already achieved… more or less.

Everything announced at Google I/O 2026 in 13 minutes In an onstage interview with Mike Allen, co-founder of the news site Axios, on Wednesday, Hassabis expanded on his forecast. He sees AGI coming “around 2030, plus or minus a year,” but argued it would not arrive as a single abrupt disruption but as a series of gradual upgrades that would unlock unparalleled innovation. “Step one, solve intelligence; step two, use it to solve everything else,” he said. “We are on the cusp of that now.”Asked how we’d know when AGI arrives, Hassabis cited his version of the Einstein Test: Train a would-be AGI on physics up to 1901, then see if it can come up with the same insights and discoveries that Albert Einstein began publishing in 1905. “Today's systems clearly can't, but I don't see why in the future they won't be able to,” Hassabis predicted.Allen then threw a softball question, asking what gave Google enough of an edge in AI to be in a position to win that category. Hassabis questioned the framing of AI as a market with a single winner. “It's the most ferocious competition that's ever been in tech history, maybe in corporate history,” he said, saying there are “very capable and brilliant people in all organizations.”But he did allow that Google has a “broader research bench than the other labs” and is better at taking AI built for professional applications and putting it in consumer services such as web search. Hassabis called AI Mode in web search “unbelievably popular”; the reactions we’ve seen on social media to Google’s I/O presentation suggest that is not a universally held belief.Allen acknowledged that AI skepticism, citing a story on the front page of The Wall Street Journal about the growing backlash to AI. He did not describe the lead anecdote: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting booed by University of Arizona graduates after he urged them to look at AI’s upsides in a commencement speech that also nodded to its negative consequences.  Hassabis, having just said Google wants AI “to be for the benefit of everyone and the benefit of humanity,” suggested that Google’s competitors are not being the most persuasive advocates of AI. “Some of the ways, I guess, my peers are talking about this, I don't really agree,” he said without naming names. We will: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has become infamous for suggesting that AI will mean occupational doom for vast swaths of white-collar jobs, while Elon Musk has mused that AI developed by the wrong people could lead to the extinction of humanity.Hassabis himself was among more than 100 AI experts to sign a 2023 statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Recommended by Our Editors I Wore Google's Android XR Glasses. Here's What Impressed Me Most Omni, Pics, and a Big Search Overhaul: Everything You Missed at Google I/O 2026 Do Google's I/O AI Announcements Live Up to the Hype? I Put Them to the Test

At I/O, Hassabis said the transition to a post-AGI world would be dramatic—“something like 10 times the impact of the industrial revolution, and 10 times faster”—but was not doomed to be destructive. “I'm actually very optimistic about human ingenuity,” he told Allen. “There's going to be changes, but overall I think it will be better”—as in, “the next thousand years of human flourishing if we get this right.”Citing advances being delivered by AI in fields like medicine, materials science, mathematics, and energy—examples of focused AI models that many industry observers distinguish from general-purpose chatbots—Hassabis said the tech industry should be clearer at showing those benefits. He brought up weather as another area where AI can deliver meaningful advances over traditional forecast models that can “take weeks to run.” In extreme weather events—made more frequent by global warming, which will be worsened by the fossil-fueled data centers that Meta and xAI are enthusiastically building—such delays can be fatal. AI weather forecasting, Hassabis said, can deliver needed predictions far enough in advance to allow for life-saving preparations, even if it’s only “a day ahead of time.” Allen closed by asking if Hassabis found Silicon Valley’s “freneticism” off-putting compared with his usual surroundings. DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 for a reported $400 million, continues to maintain a major presence in London. “It's always great to plug into the energy,” Hassabis said, though he warned that it can get in the way of “thinking deeply about hard topics” with sufficient patience.“There's a bit of an obsession out here with just velocity,” he said. “More critical is the direction of that velocity vector.”

About Our Expert Rob Pegoraro Contributor Experience Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs. Latest By Rob Pegoraro Pope Leo XIV: Unchecked AI Development Risks Building a New Tower of Babel