DeepMind: Hassabis predicts revolutionary AGI in 10 years

The CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, recently shared his bold vision for artificial general intelligence (AGI), which he compares to an industrial revolution multiplied by ten, but concentrated within a single decade. During his appearance on the 20VC podcast, Hassabis stated, "I sometimes quantify AGI as 10 times the industrial revolution at 10 times the speed. So, happening over a decade instead of a century." He believes there is "a very good chance that this will happen in the next 5 years," a prediction that remains unchanged since Shane Legg, co-founder of DeepMind, anticipated in 2010 that it would take 20 years.

To achieve this ambitious goal, several technological advancements are still needed. Among these, Hassabis mentions continuous learning, long-term planning, improvements in memory architectures, and greater coherence in AI systems. Currently, AI systems are described by Hassabis as "sawtooth intelligences," capable of impressive performance in certain tasks but likely to fail on elementary questions if posed differently.

Hassabis also highlighted a gap in public perception of AI. "Today and in the coming year, things are a bit overhyped in the field of AI," he observed. However, he believes that the revolutionary impact of AGI is still largely underestimated over a period of about ten years.