In brief
\nGoogle DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said artificial general intelligence could arrive around 2030, “plus or minus a year.”
\nHassabis warned society has limited time to prepare for AGI’s economic and social consequences.
\nHis comments come as the AI industry remains divided over how close AGI actually is.<\/p>\n
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis believes artificial general intelligence is no longer a distant scientific goal but one that will emerge in the very near future.<\/p>\n
Speaking at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event<\/a> last week, the AI pioneer said he expects AGI<\/a>, the point at which AI is capable of performing a broad range of intellectual tasks at or beyond human levels, to emerge by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n “We’ve been calling AGI this next version of really general artificial intelligence,” Hassabis said. “I believe that we’re only a few years away from that, maybe like 2030 plus or minus a year, which is astounding to think, really.”<\/p>\n Hassabis framed the moment as the beginning of a \u201cnew human era.\u201d<\/p>\n \ufeff<\/p>\n “When we look back at this time, I think that maybe 10 years from now, we’ll realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now,” he said.<\/p>\n According to Hassabis, 2026 marked a turning point, with AI agents and tool-use capabilities becoming genuinely useful in people’s work and giving developers a clearer view of the remaining steps needed to reach AGI, while also arguing that preparation for its arrival can no longer be left to technologists alone.<\/p>\n “Society needs to hear that because we don’t have long to prepare for what that means. It’s going to be enormously profound,\u201d he said. “The future, in my view, is still to be written, but these next few years are going to be very critical as to which way that will go and how we collectively want that to look like.\u201d<\/p>\n Hassabis\u2019 remarks come as the debate over how close the industry is to achieving AGI continues to grow.<\/p>\n Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed<\/a> OpenAI knows how to build AGI “as we have traditionally understood it” and suggested AI agents could begin joining the workforce. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have also predicted AGI-level systems could arrive within the next few years.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019ll hit AGI in 2026,\u201d Musk said<\/a> in December during an interview with the executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis. \u201cI’m confident by 2030, AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined.\u201d<\/p>\n Others argue the milestone has already been reached<\/a> and current frontier models already meet the definition of AGI.<\/p>\n “I think that we’re at the inflection point where we have AGI,” Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters previously told Decrypt. “I completely believe that this is general intelligence.”<\/p>\n