DeepMind CEO Predicts Human-Level AI Within a Decade

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), comparable to human intellectual capabilities, is expected to emerge within the next 10 years, according to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, as reported by CNBC.

“I think today’s systems are very passive; they still lack many abilities. But I believe that in the next 5-10 years, many of these capabilities will come to the forefront, and we will begin to move towards what we call artificial general intelligence,” he said.

By AGI, Hassabis refers to AI that can exhibit “all those complex human-level abilities.”

“We haven’t reached that point yet. Existing systems are impressive in some aspects. But there are other things they cannot do yet, and we still have a lot of research work ahead,” the expert asserts.

Hassabis offered a more cautious forecast regarding the timeline for AGI compared to other experts. In November 2024, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated that artificial intelligence would reach human-level by 2026.

Cisco’s Chief Product Officer Jitu Patel believes there is a chance to see the first examples of AGI at work this year.

“There is basic AI that we all encounter now. Then there is artificial general intelligence, which has cognitive abilities equivalent to humans. And then there is what is called superintelligence. I think you will see significant evidence of AGI in 2025. It’s not about years. I think superintelligence is, at best, a few years away,” he said.

Hassabis believes that to achieve general artificial intelligence, existing AI systems must be taught to understand the context of the real world. While solutions capable of solving problems and performing tasks autonomously have been developed in the gaming sector, implementing such technology in the real world is more challenging.

“The question is how quickly we can generalize ideas of planning, reasoning, and agent behavior, and then apply this to work in the real world […]” he asserts.

Hassabis and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian stated that so-called “multi-agent” AI systems are a technological achievement gaining momentum behind the scenes. Active work is currently underway in this direction.

Back in 2022, Elon Musk suggested that humanity would develop AGI by 2029.