Demis Hassabis does not believe that today’s chatbots are in their final stages.
Google DeepMind’s CEO says artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive around 2030. Hassabis runs one of the most important AI laboratories in the world, and DeepMind is already showing how machine learning can transform science. The most famous is the Nobel Prize winner AlphaFold, which solved the 50-year-old “protein folding” problem. It took thousands of scientists decades to map the structures of 150,000 proteins, but AlphaFold has cataloged the predicted structures of more than 200 million proteins, including nearly every known protein on Earth.
So Hassabis knows a thing or two about AI, and when he talks about it, I tend to listen carefully.
“We’re probably a few years away from that, probably 2030 plus or minus a year. It’s amazing when you really think about it,” Hassabis said in an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “I think it’s going to be a very big game-changing technology,” he added. “It will be, in effect, a new era for humanity.”
AGI is believed to match or exceed human cognitive abilities in all intellectual tasks, from coding and scientific research to the creative arts. Unlike today’s “narrow” AI, which is trained for specific functions like translation or chess, AGI will be autonomous and universally adaptable. This means that entirely new skills can be learned, synthesized, and applied without human reprogramming. AGI will be able to autonomously solve some of the world’s toughest problems and improve itself.
This is a true paradigm shift. Because it will move humanity into an era where there is a virtually limitless supply of cognitive labor that can accelerate scientific discoveries, automate complex industries, and rebuild the global economy overnight. No one knows what the world will be like when such god-like technology emerges, but we can only hope that it will never be the same.
If Hassabis is correct, society has only a few years to prepare for technologies that have the potential to reshape work, security, and daily life.
More than just a chatbot
In a recent fireside chat at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Hassabis said AI is entering a “species-level transition.” He also said that humanity has “little margin for error” over the next decade.
He argues that the next big step will come from AI agents. These are systems that do more than just respond to prompts in a chat window. They perform a series of tasks in the real world.
In his example, an AI agent can book a week-long vacation across 20 websites. More powerful versions could be useful in implementing drug development research programs.
In fact, Hassabis believes this is the best part of the study. He described AGI as “the ultimate tool for science” and summed up DeepMind’s mission in its winning formula as “Step 1: Solve intelligence. Step 2: Use it to solve everything else.”
The industry has not agreed on a schedule.
Hassabis is not the only AI leader to make bold predictions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman writes, “Humanity is moving closer to building a digital superintelligence.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted in 2024 that AGI could arrive as early as 2026-2027. But technology leaders have an incentive to manipulate the pace of AI progress because it helps them secure more funding or expand their stock.
Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta and one of the pioneers of modern machine learning, is more negative. “The concept of general intelligence is complete BS,” he said, according to Fast Company. LeCun argues that today’s large-scale language models are unlikely to reach human-level intelligence or create the kind of high-value work that AGI boosters envision.
Even within DeepMind, predictions vary. Shane Legg, chief AGI scientist at DeepMind, predicts a 50% chance of “minimal AGI” arriving in 2028. “Minimal AGI” means an AI that can complete some cognitive tasks that humans can perform, but is not better than humans.
Hassabis told the audience gathered at Stanford that he tends to agree that some in the industry are “too certain” about their predictions.
Yet he keeps coming back to the same warning. I can’t wait to get ready.
“I think there’s still a lot of work to be done, but this is just the beginning,” Hassabis said. “I think society needs to listen to that, because it won’t take long to prepare for what it means. And it’s going to be very serious.”
The benefits are huge. So are the risks.
The optimistic case for AGI is easy to understand. It could accelerate medical research, help design new materials, improve climate models, advance fusion energy, and make scientific discoveries faster and cheaper. If used for good purposes, AGI could lead to the long-running futurist idea of a “post-scarcity world,” one in which technology makes goods and services so abundant that everyone is satisfied from a material standpoint.
“Humans should always maintain their sense of meaning and what they focus their lives on,” Hassabis says. “We should not become passive recipients of technology in this way.”
But in the wrong hands, Frontier AGI could help bad actors design pathogens, automate cyberattacks, amplify disinformation to terrifying levels, and control all humans with an all-seeing eye. That’s why Hassabis supports “smart and targeted” regulation, including an independent assessment of model functionality.
Even before AI overlords took over the world, labor issues were already pressing. AI writes code, creates documents, and automates many office tasks. AI-powered efficiency contributed to more than 150,000 job cuts globally in the first half of 2026 alone. And this is significantly higher than the previous year’s total. The technology industry is bearing the direct brunt of this transition. for example, guardian Amazon has reportedly cut 30,000 employees over six months as part of an aggressive management restructuring. Meanwhile, payments giant Block cut its workforce by 40% in February following management’s directive to focus on AI-powered productivity. Social media giant Meta has cut 10% of its workforce as it aggressively invests in its multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure, a trend echoed by smaller tech companies like Cloudflare and edtech company Chegg.
Altman warned that AI could eliminate large categories of jobs. According to Amodei, half of entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear within five years. business insider.
Hassabis believes that even in a job market dominated by powerful AI systems, there is still room for humans to thrive. He argues that people with “taste, design sensibility, creative thinking” and “the ability to synthesize different themes” will be in a strong position over the next five years.
“I think some great new things will be created,” Hassabis said. “I’m a big believer in human ingenuity. Humans can adapt on the fly.”
“Remember that we ourselves are general intelligences. Look at what we’ve built around us using our hunter-gatherer brains. It’s incredible. Why do we stop here?”
